Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé

Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé is an 1876 oil on canvas painting by the French, modernist painter, Édouard Manet. The painting is a portrait of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who was a friend and colleague of Manet's. Manet and Mallarmé met in 1873 and developed a strong bond, seeing each other almost daily until Manet's death in 1883. Mallarmé enlisted Manet's help in illustrating his own poems and his translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale The Raven. This familiarity between artist and subject might explain why contemporaries considered Manet’s painting of Mallarmé to be an accurate depiction of the poet. The painting depicts Mallarmé resting casually on a couch, holding a cigar, appearing to be in deep contemplation. Some art historians draw similarities between Manet’s portrait of Mallarmé and his illustrations for Mallarmé’s translation of The Raven. The painting was acquired from Mallarmé's family by the Louvre Museum in 1928, and it was later transferred to its present location in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Subject
brown hair, walrus moustache, sitting, chaise longue, smoking, frock coat, paper, man, cigar, cigarette, Stéphane Mallarmé