La lectura

By the mid 1860s Manet was the painter the Salon jury loved to reject, the man whose Olympia had scandalised Paris in 1865. This picture is the quiet other side of him. It shows his wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, seated on a sofa in a flowing white dress against a pale room, her hands folded in her lap. The young man reading beside her is Léon, the boy Manet raised. He worked the canvas over several years, and you can see two moods meeting in it, the calm domestic hush and the loose, quick brushwork that was getting him into so much trouble elsewhere. White on white, with almost nothing to grab onto, was exactly the kind of thing critics complained they could not read. It went to the Louvre in the 1940s and moved to the Musée d'Orsay when that museum opened.