Haste de peônias e tesoura de poda

1864 went badly for Manet at the Salon. He sent two large canvases, a dead Christ attended by angels and a scene from a bullfight, and the critics went after both of them, picking apart the perspective in the bullfight and calling the Christ indecently corpse-like. When the bullfight came back from the exhibition he took a knife to it and cut two smaller pictures out of the canvas.

Through the same months he was painting peonies over and over. They were his favourite flower and he grew them at the family property at Gennevilliers, just outside Paris. Here one cut stem lies on a table with the pruning shears still beside it, the petals already loosening at the edges. He kept returning to the subject through 1864 and 1865, and in several of those canvases the shears are lying there too.