George Moore (1852–1933)

Manet made this in a single sitting in 1879. He was 47 and already ill enough that long hours at a large canvas were becoming difficult, so he had turned to pastel, which was quick. He left about 80 of them, mostly heads of people who passed through his studio. The sitter is George Moore, a young Irishman who had come to Paris to be a painter and was not going to manage it. He went home, became a novelist, and years later put this portrait at the front of a book he wrote about modern painting. When it was exhibited in Paris in 1880 the press nicknamed it the drowned man fished out of the water. Manet began at least two more portraits of Moore, one of him at a cafe table, and finished neither. That one is in the same museum.