Le Fifre

A year before Manet painted this, in 1865, he went to Madrid and stood in front of Velázquez in the Prado. He came home changed. He told a friend that in one Velázquez portrait the background simply disappeared and the man stood in air. That is what he tries here with a boy, a fifer from the band of Napoleon III's Imperial Guard. There is almost no room around him. No floor line, no wall, just a flat grey that refuses to tell you how far away he is or how big he is. That flatness looked wrong to the Salon jury, and they rejected the picture in 1866. The young writer Émile Zola went to war in the newspapers on Manet's behalf. Notice how the black stripe down the trousers is painted as a single confident band, more sign than seam.