Portrait of Marcellin Desboutin

In the spring of 1876 the jury of the Paris Salon, the official yearly exhibition, turned down both pictures Manet sent in, this portrait and a garden scene of a woman at a washtub. Manet answered by opening his own studio on the rue de Saint-Pétersbourg to the public, and the invitation carried the line “Faire vrai, laisser dire”, roughly, paint it true and let them talk. The man in the battered top hat is Marcellin Desboutin, a painter, engraver and playwright who had come back to Paris in 1872 after some 18 years in Florence. He holds a small pouch whose purpose scholars still argue over. The critic Armand Silvestre singled out the big greyhound drinking at his feet and wrote that Velázquez would not have disowned it. That same year Desboutin posed for Degas too, as the man beside the actress Ellen Andrée in the café picture known as L'Absinthe.