Given this circumstance we might say that Manet's costume is a decoy, for while it doubtless attracts us, to read it as an index of this painter's self-image may be to fall for a cunning deception. In fact, Manet's gaze appears to penetrate his social mien - the self-as-spectacle - so as to plumb deeper leagues of his private identity. arises, however, as one takes note of a telling detail: the painter's gaze itself, at once redoubtable and reflexive, subtly tempers our first impression. As if to lionize Manet as Fantin's gregarious and convivial creature, we often explain the Self-Portrait with a Palette as a souvenir of personal achievement, an automemento in which Manet celebrates himself as the "stylish and successful" gentleman painter.(3) That assessment has the merit of economy, for it derives simply from Manet's costume - the suave frock coat, the cravat with pearl clip, the rakish bowler - with which he strikes an impressive, if not exceedingly confident, pose. Nobody questions whether its sense of gravity genuinely arises from the artist's nature the mood is evident, for instance, in Manet's photographic portrait by Nadar of 1865.(2) Still, we tend to expect of this "hero" of modern painting the amiable mien of a social aesthete, that is, the congenial if reticent flaneur with top hat and walking stick - as Manet had been figured for posterity by Henri Fantin-Latour in a flattering portrait of 1867. This rather troubled image of Manet is unlike any other of him extant. Both hands thrust into his coat pockets, the painter shifts toward the raking light to train his attention on an urgent problem. Manet spreads wide his feet, so as to mime a steady, if haunted statue. Executed about the same time as the portrait with palette, it is a painter's full-length posturing as a pensive scholar. Manet's only other serf-portrait is notably different in conception. Even Manet's palette takes a critical stance in this tight cloister: at once a common tool and a painter's coat-of-arms, or auto-insignia, it is held at the hip like a heraldic battle shield, as if to steel the painter against his own self-scrutiny. In sum, we serve as a complex foil that returns Manet's gaze to his own body and the canvas itself, in a continuous three-way shuttle. This Self-Portrait with a Palette is one of only two formal self-portraits that Manet conceived in his prolific, if succinct career.(1) As the painter gazes outward, he engages us in no simple standoff rather, our position is uncertain, perhaps that of a portrait sitter, the painter himself, or a mirror before him. EXCERPT: In 1878, at the age of forty-six, Edouard Manet painted a picture of himself painting a picture. In turn, the subjective visuality of nineteenth-century modernism signals perhaps not so radical a departure from a former "ocularcentric regime" than is commonly presumed. It is proposed that the early historical precedence of a "mirror mode" in realist painting calls for a new, multivalent reading of the praxis of mimesis (and its public reception) in the premodern era. This essay is a hermeneutic investigation into a "mirror mode of looking," which the author defines as a strategy of semiotic representation inherited by Manet from a host of predecessors, including Van Eyck, Titian, Velázquez, Steen, Vermeer, and Watteau.
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