Ragazzo che fa le bolle di sapone

Manet painted this in 1867, and the boy holding the pipe was part of his own household. He is Leon Leenhoff, the son of Suzanne Leenhoff, the woman Manet had married, a boy raised in the family though never openly acknowledged as anyone's son. Here he's about 15, leaning over a bowl of soapy water and sending up a single fragile bubble. That image has a long history. Blowing bubbles was for centuries a standard emblem of vanitas, a reminder of how briefly life lasts, and Manet is looking straight back at an 18th-century picture of the same subject by Chardin, borrowing its dark plain background and its quiet. But Manet drains the sermon out of it. There's no skull, no motto, just a real boy absorbed in a small task, painted with a cool and level attention. The picture is now in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, bought by the collector Gulbenkian during the Second World War.