Young man in Mayo costume

1863 was the year of the great scandal. Manet's picnic scene, the Déjeuner sur l'herbe, was thrown out of the official Salon and shown instead at the Salon des Refusés, the exhibition of rejected works that Emperor Napoleon III had allowed in answer to complaints about unfair judging. This full-length figure hung there too. It belongs to Manet's Spanish phase, when he was steeped in Velázquez and Goya, and it shows a young man in the swaggering outfit of a majo, one of the dashing young men of Madrid. The model was not Spanish at all, but Manet's youngest brother, Gustave. Critics grumbled that the face had been painted with no more care than the buttons on the jacket.