Femme parmi les fleurs

Manet painted this in 1879, when illness had begun to close in on him. The disease that would kill him four years later was already stiffening his legs, and he stayed closer to home and garden, working small and quick. Here a young woman in a pale dress sits among dense green foliage, the leaves dabbed in loose, sketchy strokes with the bare canvas showing through in places. It has the freshness of something caught outdoors in a single afternoon. Manet never called himself an Impressionist, yet in these late garden pictures he came closest to the open-air lightness of the younger painters he knew. The canvas reached the Lyon museum in 1997, left to the city by the actress and collector Jacqueline Delubac.