Junge mit Seifenblasen

A fifteen-year-old boy leans over a bowl and breathes a soap bubble into being. Manet painted it in 1867, and the bubble, fragile and about to vanish, is one of the oldest signs of how short life is.

The story behind the painting

Manet painted Boy Blowing Bubbles in oil on canvas in 1867 and gave it the title it still carries; it is also known as The Soap Bubbles, Les Bulles de savon in French. The model is Léon Koelin-Leenhoff, the son of Suzanne Leenhoff, the woman Manet would marry. Léon was born out of wedlock, and Wikipedia notes that his father may have been Manet himself or Manet's own father. Here he is fifteen, quietly absorbed in a game that belongs to childhood, at an age when childhood is ending.

What to look for

The canvas measures about 100.5 by 81.4 cm. Look at how little colour Manet allows: the palette is nearly monochrome and the background is dark, a debt to the old masters he admired. Against that darkness the boy's face and hands and the round bubble catch the light. His clothes are contemporary, not a costume, and the surface is roughly impasted, the paint laid on thickly so you can feel the brush. Nothing else crowds the picture, no books, no props, only the boy, the bowl and the bubble.

Meaning and intent

Soap bubbles are a traditional symbol of the brevity of life. Manet's teacher Thomas Couture had painted the same subject in 1859, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but filled his picture with narrative and symbolic details such as school books and a laurel wreath. Manet stripped them away. His picture sits closer to an eighteenth-century model, Chardin's Soap Bubbles of 1737, now in Washington. The old symbol stays, but the treatment is naturalistic, matching Manet's Realist determination to paint modern life as he saw it.

Legacy

Boy Blowing Bubbles is one of 17 works Manet painted in the 1860s and 1870s showing young Léon; others include Boy Carrying a Sword and Luncheon in the Studio. Seen together, they let us watch one boy grow up in front of the painter. The picture later crossed the Atlantic: Calouste Gulbenkian acquired it through André Weil in New York in November 1943, and today it hangs in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, where the bubble has stayed unbroken for more than a century and a half.