La Brioche

In 1870 the Louvre received a still life by the 18th-century master Jean Simeon Chardin, a plain brioche painted with almost devotional care. Manet, who called still life the touchstone of a painter, answered it that same year with this. He piled the buttery loaf with peaches, plums and grapes, laid a knife with a mother-of-pearl handle across the cloth, and crowned the bread with a single pink rose, a nod to the rose Chardin had set on his own. It was the last of these large, formal tabletop scenes Manet would paint. Within months the Prussians were marching on Paris and he put such things aside to serve in the city's defence.