토끼

Manet painted this hanging hare in the summer of 1881, in a house he had rented near Versailles to get out of Paris. He was seriously ill by then, his legs failing from the disease that would kill him two years later, and he could no longer take on the big, demanding canvases of his earlier career. So he made smaller things, garden corners and simple still lifes like this one, part of a set of four decorative panels of fruit and game. The subject is as old as still-life painting itself, a dead animal strung up outside a window. What is new is the handling, fast and loose and open, the fur and the curtain behind it brushed in with the freedom of the younger Impressionists he had encouraged.