The Rabbit

1866 was a bruising year for Manet. His Olympia had scandalised Paris the season before, and now the Salon jury turned his new work away, leaving the young writer Emile Zola almost alone in defending him in print. In the middle of that noise he painted this, a single dead rabbit, hung by one leg against a plain ground. It is an old and humble subject, the kind of hanging game the 18th-century master Chardin had painted a hundred years earlier, and Manet openly admired that tradition. There is nothing here to argue over, no modern nude to enrage the critics. Just a rabbit, the fur and the weight of it, set down with a few broad, confident strokes.