The Urchin (Le Gamin)

Like his etching Lola de Valence, on view nearby, Manet’s lithograph The Urchin was a reinterpretation of one of his own paintings. Street urchins, or gamins, would have been recognized by the public as referencing figures in the seventeenth-century paintings of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Diego Velázquez. The subject attests to the artist’s deep engagement with Spanish art and his tendency to borrow visual tropes from art history and translate them into a contemporary context. It also suggests the significant role that reproductive prints played in transmitting visual culture, as that is how Manet would have known and studied such historical paintings.

Manet worked in etching, lithography, and transfer processes at different periods in his career. He was drawn to printmaking as a means to popularize his art.