Portrait of Monsieur Brun

Portrait of Monsieur Brun (1879), at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, depicts a figure from Manet's social circle in the productive period of the late 1870s when his portrait practice was at its most prolific. The sitter's identity connects the work to the network of friendships and professional relationships that gave Manet's portraiture its particular social character—these were images made within a community of mutual attention and regard rather than purely as commercial transactions. The National Museum of Western Art's holding of this work reflects Japan's significant nineteenth-century collecting of French Impressionist and post-Impressionist material.

Manet's handling of a male portrait in this period is characteristically direct—the face painted with fluid, searching brushwork that captures the sitter's specific physiognomy without idealisation. Costume is rendered with attention to material quality, particularly if the sitter wears the fashionable dark suit that Manet repeatedly depicted with such authoritative paint handling. The composition is likely relatively simple, concentrating on the sitter's presence.