Le petit Lange

A small boy in his Sunday best stands against a dark brown ground, whip and bridle in hand, and meets your eyes without a smile. Manet painted him around 1861, and to this day nobody can say for certain who he was.

The story behind the painting

Little Lange shows a boy of about five from the Lange family, friends of Manet. The painter wrote a dedication, à Mme h. Lange, in the lower left corner under his signature; Juliet Wilson-Bareau notes the h could be an n. Manet's son Léon Leenhoff recalled that a Madame Lange attended the Tuesday literary salon held by Manet's wife and mother. The exact date is unknown: a family photo album with a Lange carte de visite beside a photograph marked 1861 suggests that year, and Wikipedia calls it c. 1861. In 1916 Théodore Duret wrote that the child was a son of Monsieur Lange, a collaborator of Ferdinand de Lesseps on the Suez Canal.

What to look for

The canvas, 117 by 71 cm, is almost all dark: a boy in black against brown, his gaze direct. Look at his hands, holding a whip and a red bridle, which may echo the toys and red-plumed hat in Goya's portrait of Pepito Costa y Bonelis. The hat and the life-size, frontal pose recall Watteau's Gilles in the Louvre. The palette is close to Spanish Golden Age painting, the Spanish black some historians see in Manet. Parts of the picture are sketchy, a looseness that points to his later work.

Meaning and intent

In the Paris of the 1860s Spanish art was in fashion, and Manet copied Velázquez in the Louvre; his Boy with a Sword shows a similar boy on a brown ground. Goya's Portrait of Victor Guye, a boy in black facing the viewer, is another likely source. Historians also feel Watteau's melancholy in Lange. Later Manet mostly painted children within larger scenes, but near the end of his life Henry Bernstein as a Child returned to almost the same pose, a hat in hand and the same direct gaze.

Legacy

The Lange family kept the painting for decades before it appeared at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in 1911. It then passed through Alexander von Frey in Paris, Paul von Bleichert in Leipzig, the Swiss collector Josef Müller, Howard Young in New York, and Annie Swan Coburn, who lent it to the Art Institute of Chicago. Ralph C. Colin bought it at a Parke-Bernet auction in 1944. In 1962 it entered the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, paid for by a fund drawn from the state lottery of Baden-Württemberg. Research for the 2002 and 2003 Manet exhibitions in Paris and New York could not confirm the boy's identity.