La Petite Lange

In 1861 Manet was still a young painter working his way toward the pictures that would soon get him howled at in the Salon. This is a quieter thing from that moment: the small son of the Lange family, friends of his, sat for a portrait done in the dark, Spanish palette he was studying then from Velazquez and the old masters in the Louvre. You can watch him working it out. The face is finished with real care, while the clothes and background are brushed in loosely, almost sketched. Manet placed a dedication to Madame Lange in the lower left, beside his signature. Historians have never firmly pinned down the boy's first name, though his father was the businessman Daniel Adolphus Lange.