Donna in abito da sera

Manet painted this in 1880, and by then he was a sick man. He had locomotor ataxia, a slow nerve disease that would kill him within three years, and that summer he was out at Bellevue on the edge of Paris taking water cures for his failing legs. Big public pictures were getting hard, so he worked smaller and closer to hand, often on the fashionable women of Paris in their afternoon and evening clothes. Here one of them sits at a table set with flowers and fruit, in black and white, caught with the quick, sure touch he never lost. In these last years he leaned more and more on pastel too, a lighter medium he could manage in short sittings from a chair.