Little Lange

Painted in 1861 and now at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Little Lange depicts a young boy in a red cap who has been identified as Léon Leenhoff, the son (or possibly illegitimate son) of Manet himself. Léon appears in numerous Manet paintings across several decades, always unnamed in public — his parentage was the subject of deliberate ambiguity that protected both Manet and his wife Suzanne. The painting belongs to Manet's early maturity when he was absorbing lessons from Spanish painting and Dutch genre art, producing life-size or near-life-size single figures with a directness and simplicity that was startling to Salon audiences.

The figure is rendered with the bold simplicity of Manet's early manner — a direct frontal pose, strong tonal contrasts between the dark jacket and the paler background, the red cap providing a chromatic accent. The paint is applied with confidence and relative thinness, the brushwork less laboured than his Spanish-influenced works of the same period. The face is treated with warm, direct modelling.