El pífano

A boy in a red and black uniform stands alone against an empty gray-brown space, fife at his lips, looking straight at you. Manet stripped away the whole world so that nothing could distract from him.

The story behind the painting

In 1865 Édouard Manet traveled to Spain and visited the Museo del Prado, where the art of Diego Velázquez came as a revelation. Back in Paris in 1866, he began The Fifer, also called Young Flautist. The model was a teenage musician from the band of the Imperial Guard of Napoleon III, sent to the artist by commander Lejosne. Our sources also note that other models may have posed: the likenesses of Léon Leenhoff and Victorine Meurent have both been seen in the boy's face and figure. Manet painted this anonymous young soldier in a way that imitates and turns upside down the formula of Velázquez's court portraits, treating a humble fifer like a grandee of Spain.

What to look for

Notice first what is missing. There is no floor line, no room, no landscape, only a barely inflected background of neutral tone. Because of this, it is hard to judge how tall the boy really is, or how important. Now follow the bold contours of his figure. Manet used a reduced palette laid on mostly in thick impasto: the very sharp black of the jacket and shoes, the bright red trousers, the white strap and gaiters. His hands hold the fife to his lips, and his gaze meets ours. Look for how flat the space feels, with vertical and horizontal planes barely distinguishable, so that the figure seems to stand, as one description puts it, firm, smooth and alive.

Meaning and intent

By removing a setting, Manet frustrates our usual way of measuring a person by their surroundings. That choice is part of the painting's quiet provocation. Court portraits by Velázquez honored kings and nobles; here the same dignified format is given to an unnamed child musician. The critic Peter H. Feist saw in it the appeal of the decorative effect of a single large figure with emphatic contours set against a background surface. Émile Zola, defending Manet, praised precisely the realist style and modern content that troubled others. The boy is not a hero from history or myth. He is an ordinary member of a regimental band, made monumental simply by the way he is painted.

Legacy

The jury of the Salon of 1866 rejected the painting. Outraged, Émile Zola published a series of articles in L'Événement praising Manet. In May 1867 Manet funded his own exhibition in a pavilion at the edge of the Exposition universelle; The Fifer was shown there and mocked in the popular press for its brushwork and puzzling space. The singer Jean-Baptiste Faure owned it from 1873 to 1893. It entered the national collections in 1911 from the estate of Count Isaac de Camondo, hung at the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume, and since 1986 has been at the Musée d'Orsay. In 2017 and 2018 it traveled on loan to the Louvre Abu Dhabi.