The Brioche by Manet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 2023

Title: The Brioche

Artist: Edouard Manet (French, Paris 1832–1883 Paris)

Date: 1870

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 25 5/8 x 31 7/8 in. (65.1 x 81 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Gift and Bequest of David and Peggy Rockefeller, 1991, 2017

Accession Number: 1991.287

Manet reportedly called still life the "touchstone of the painter." From 1862 to 1870 he executed several large-scale tabletop scenes of fish and fruit, of which this is the last and most elaborate. It was inspired by the donation to the Louvre of a painting of a brioche by Jean Siméon Chardin, the eighteenth-century French master of still life. Like Chardin, Manet surrounded the buttery bread with things to stimulate the senses—a brilliant white napkin, soft peaches, glistening plums, a polished knife, a bright red box—and, in traditional fashion, topped the brioche with a fragrant flower.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436946