Art Institute of Chicago

Civil War

Édouard Manet (French, 1832-1883)

Date

1871/73

Medium

Lithograph in black, with scraping, on ivory chine with red and blue fibers laid down on ivory wove paper (chine collé)

Culture

France

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Édouard Manet drew on his painting The Dead Toreador (1864; National Gallery of Art) for this print, transforming its context from a morbid twist on a festive Spanish tauromaquia to the crisis in France’s short-lived Second Empire (1852–70). The tumultuous years 1870–71 marked the humiliating defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war, the rise and suppression of the revolutionary Paris Commune, and the dawn of the Third Republic. In this print, an unidentified soldier lies behind a Parisian street barricade. A glimpse of a pin-striped civilian pant leg at the lower right hints at the encroachment of violence on everyday life.

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