剣を持つ少年

The boy is Léon Leenhoff, about ten years old, the son of the woman Manet would marry the following year, and quite possibly Manet's own son, a fact the family kept deliberately vague his whole life. Manet painted him in 1861 dressed as a page from the seventeenth-century Spanish court, holding a full-grown sword and belt that plainly do not belong to him. That costume is the clue to what Manet was after. He was steeped in Velázquez and the old Spanish masters, and he was trying to bring their dark grounds and plain, direct handling into a Paris that mostly wanted smooth storytelling pictures. This one it accepted. When the New York collector Erwin Davis gave it to the Metropolitan in 1889, it became the first painting by Manet to enter any museum's collection.