A King Charles Spaniel

A small long-haired spaniel with tawny ears and a black-and-white ball at its paws sits squarely on a garnet-red cushion, its large dark eyes turned to the viewer with an alert, quizzical gaze above a glistening snub nose. The loosely brushed white and silvery-grey fur is built of visible, confident strokes against a coffee-brown ground, the whole painted with the abbreviated touch Manet was developing in the mid-1860s, when he signed the small canvas “ed. Manet” in the lower right corner. Painted about 1866 and shown at his private exhibition at the Avenue de l’Alma the following year, the picture turns a domestic pet into a study of paint handling — the cushion, the fur and the ball each rendered as sheer facture — in the manner that made Manet the pivotal figure between Realism and Impressionism. The painting came to the National Gallery of Art in 1970 through the bequest of Ailsa Mellon Bruce. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.