The Rue Mosnier with Flags

On 30 June 1878 Paris celebrated the national holiday with a double display of flags, hung from the windows of the houses along the Rue Mosnier, the street on which Manet’s studio stood near the Gare Saint-Lazare. From his window the painter looked down the long perspective of the street, the tricolours running its full length, a workman and a woman with a child the only passers-by, and in the middle distance the crippled leg of the amputee veteran visible at the kerb — the celebration shadowed by the memory of the war and the Commune of 1871. Manet handled the scene with the fresh, direct touch of his last decade, the flags and shutters set down in brisk strokes, the whole street bathed in the clear light of a Paris summer morning; he painted the view again that year in a second, more finished version now in the Metropolitan Museum. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.