El bohemio

This young man was once part of a crowd. Manet first painted him around 1862 as one figure in a larger scene of a wandering family, then later took a knife to that canvas and cut it apart, keeping this piece on its own. To Manet the barefoot young Gypsy stood for the free, penniless artists of bohemian Montmartre, the hilltop district of Paris. He gave him a bent wrist and a calm, upright stance borrowed from grand Renaissance portraits, a touch of borrowed nobility for a poor man with nothing. The clothes are rags of blue, red, white and yellow set hard against an open sky. When Manet exhibited his work in 1863, journalists singled out exactly those bright, blunt patches of colour for complaint.