Fishing

Fishing, painted in 1862, is one of Manet's most explicitly art-historical early works — a canvas that quotes from Rubens's Park of the Castle of Steen and places Manet himself and his future wife Suzanne Leenhoff as the fishing couple in the foreground. The practice of inserting portraits into invented historical landscapes connects Manet to Van Dyck and Rubens, whose works he had studied intensively in the Louvre and during his travels to the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy between 1852 and 1856. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds this early canvas as a key document in Manet's engagement with the Old Master tradition he simultaneously absorbed and subverted throughout his career.

Manet applied paint in broad, confident strokes drawing directly on his study of Rubens and Velázquez — the landscape passages handled with rich, warm impasto while the figures are rendered with the directness and tonal simplicity that was becoming his own signature. The palette balances the dark earth tones of the Old Master tradition against the crisp black and white contrasts that mark his personal style.