The Croquet Party

Considered the most innovative French painter of the 1860s, Edouard Manet greatly influenced the artists who would become the Impressionists through his urban subjects and painterly style. Although Manet never exhibited with them, he adopted their bright and high-keyed palette from the 1870s onward. Here, Manet depicted his friends and family playing a game of croquet at a fashionable resort on the Normandy coast. On the advice of his doctor, Manet traveled there in the summer of 1871, probably to recover from the devastating siege of Paris by the Prussian army in 1870-1871, during which time he served as an officer in the French army.

Gift of Henry W. and Marion H. Bloch