Boy with Pitcher (La Régalade)

Manet's informal portraits of children and young people belong to the same strand of his work as his garden paintings and café scenes: studies of Parisian everyday life observed without the deliberate controversy of his Salon submissions. The 'régalade' — drinking directly from a pitcher tilted above the lips — was a working-class gesture that Manet observed with the same democratic curiosity he brought to absinthe drinkers and laundry women. The work likely dates from the late 1860s or early 1870s, when he was moving between formal portraiture and more casual figure studies.

Manet frames the boy tightly against a shallow background, letting the gesture of the tilted pitcher organise the upper half of the composition. The paint is applied with the brisk economy of a sketch — individual features barely finished — which paradoxically gives the image its sense of caught immediacy.