Portrait de Stéphane Mallarmé

These two men saw each other almost every day. The poet Stephane Mallarme, then a young English teacher in Paris, had met Manet in 1873, and the painter made this small portrait in 1876 partly as a thank-you, for an article Mallarme had written in his defence when critics savaged Manet's work. So it is painted the way you paint a friend, not a client. Mallarme leans back into a couch, a lit cigar in his hand, his body loose and his mind plainly somewhere else. Manet lets the thread of cigar smoke drift up toward the patterned Japanese wallpaper behind him. There are no props of the great poet, no pose, just an easy hour in the studio. The two stayed close until Manet's death in 1883.