Edouard Manet - The Fifer / Young Flautist Large Clock

The Fifer / Young Flautist (Le Fifre), painted by Édouard Manet in 1866 in oil on canvas, presents an anonymous young regimental musician playing his fife against an almost depthless grey background. Inspired by Manet’s encounter with Velázquez at the Prado during his 1865 trip to Spain, particularly Pablo de Valladolid, the painting treats an ordinary child from a military band with the monumentality of a Spanish grandee. Bold areas of black, red and white, a reduced palette and minimal modelling flatten the figure so radically that contemporaries compared the work to a playing card. Rejected by the Salon jury in 1866, The Fifer became one of the paintings that inspired Émile Zola’s enthusiastic public defence of Manet and of his distinctly modern approach to painting.