White Lilac, Édouard Manet

White Lilac, Édouard Manet

This spray of lilac — as laconic as it is tonally fascinating — is one of a group of still lifes that Manet painted in the last years of his life as he was becoming increasingly ill. Manet’s brush records with simplicity and sensitivity the transient effects of light on the tender pastel colors of the lilac, on the restless texture of the blossoms, and in the independent restlessness of the light refractions in the water. Decades before, he had devoted considerable painterly finesse to simple still lifes. But late works like this one, with its concentration on finely gradated color combinations — blue, green, and brown — and on the meticulously observed materiality of the heavy flower heads, is pure painting, practised for its own sake and, in its concentration, bearing witness to the wise self-limitation of the mature, older artist.