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The Fifer
Édouard Manet · Realism & Academic
- Artist
- Édouard Manet (1832–1883)
- Date
- 1866
- Dimensions
- 160 x 97 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France
The Fifer shows a young boy of the Imperial Guard band playing his fife, standing alone against a flat, grey-green background, in his black jacket with gold buttons and bright red trousers with black stripes.
A closer look
Manet removed all sense of setting: there is no floor, no horizon, no room, only the faintest shadow at the boy's feet. The figure stands out like a playing card, painted in flat areas of colour with very little modelling, a lesson Manet learned from Velázquez's portraits and from Japanese prints. The Salon jury rejected the painting in 1866, finding it too crude and unfinished. Émile Zola defended it passionately, comparing its simplicity to that of popular prints. It anticipated the flatness of modern painting.
History of the painting
After the Salon rejected it, the painting stayed with Manet until 1872, when the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought it with a large group of his works. The next year it passed to the famous baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, a major collector of Manet, and in 1894 to Count Isaac de Camondo, who bequeathed his collection to the Louvre in 1911. It went on show there in 1914 and moved to the Musée d’Orsay in 1986.
More by Édouard Manet
In this gallery
Famous works elsewhere
- The Balcony 1868
- The Railway 1873