Line in front of the Butcher Shop
Edouard Manet French
Publisher Alfred Strölin French
Not on view
During the Siege of Paris, Manet wrote to his family in the southwest of France about the increasing scarcity of provisions, especially meat, describing queues in front of butcher shops from four in the morning. Here, a crowd waiting to gain entry to a guarded door—the soldier’s presence indicated only by the bayonet that juts above their heads—suggests such a scene. This is perhaps Manet’s most formally radical etching, achieved with great economy of means. The figures are conveyed almost without contour through alternating vertical and horizontal hatching, while other forms are defined by the blank reserve of the paper.
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