La Maison de Rueil

Manet painted this in the summer of 1882, and he was dying as he did it. Locomotor ataxia had wrecked his legs — walking was hard, standing at an easel harder — so his family rented a house at Rueil-Malmaison outside Paris where he could rest. He could not range far for a subject, so the subject came to him: the front of the rented house, its door and shutters, the garden and gravel in bright afternoon light. He made two of them, this wider view and a taller one now in Melbourne. There are no people in it, just the warm façade and the trees. He was back in Paris by the autumn and dead the following April, at 51.