Roses dans un verre de champagne

By 1882 Manet was seriously ill. The painter who had scandalised Paris with life-size modern nudes could now barely stand at an easel, his legs failing from the disease that would kill him the next year. Friends kept bringing him flowers, and in his last months he painted them small and quick, on canvases he could manage while seated. This is a handful of roses dropped into a champagne glass, no bigger than a page, the glass and the water caught in a few sure strokes. He made a number of these little flower pieces in his final year, working smaller and smaller as his strength went, and died in the spring of 1883, at 51.