What is the situation of this young woman? Her cigarette suggests
a certain impropriety - perhaps she is a prostitute waiting for a
customer. Or, more likely, given her modest dress, she is only a
shopgirl hoping for company. Manet's composition underscores her
isolation. Our vantage point is close, as if we stand above her,
but she is blind to our presence, lost in a pensive mood. The hard
marble table acts as a bar between us. And her head is set off,
framed by the grille behind her. The grille suggests that the
setting may be the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes where Manet
gathered often with other members of the avant-garde, including
writer Emile Zola and younger painters like Monet and Renoir.
It was Zola who drew attention to what is often called
the "painted patch" style of Manet's work. Writing in 1867, he
described it as "an ensemble of delicate, accurate taches
('touches' or 'patches') which, from a few steps back, give a
striking relief to the picture." Notice how individual dabs of
color create the plum in its glass and the fingers of the woman's
left hand. These broad strokes, accepted by many younger artists
as a badge of modernity, could only have been made with the sort
of flat-tipped brushes familiar today - and these first became
available in the nineteenth century.
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