Favourite Painting #14

On first glance, Fifer (1866) is simply a painting of an innocent young boy. In reality, however, it is one of Manet’s oddest “portraits” of Victorine Meurent: she was one of several models who sat for the painting. As a result, her eyes seem to peer strangely from another’s face. The fifer’s intense but abstracted gaze and light, half-formed eyebrows seem lifted directly from The Street Singer, and the hand that blocks Victorine’s mouth in that painting is echoed here by the fife before the boy’s lips - a reminder of Manet’s obsession with control.

- Nathalie Lagerfeld, Princeton Class of 2009


Edouard Manet: The Fifer, 1866

Of The Fifer, 1866, Zola remarked that Manet did not shrink from "the abruptness of nature": "His whole being bids him to see in patches, in simple elements charged with energy." The same claims would be made by the postimpressionists—patch and discontinuity, "arrangement" as against continuous modeling. If The Fifer were a little more abstract, more "Japanese," it would almost be a Van Gogh. At times, Manet's tact in balancing the decorative and the real almost passes belief, an example being the black stripe on the fifer's right leg—swelling and closing with negligent grace, extending the black of the tunic only to stop it an interval above the foot.

- Robert Hughes (TIME)