I’m starting to believe Édouard Manet may be the most besotted artist of his era. This is the third time I’ve featured a work of his. Today’s painting is known as Le Bon Bock or “A Good Glass of Beer,” though sometimes it’s called Study of Emile Bellot.

The painting is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Gallery Label is: “Bock is a dark, rich beer made in the spring. This vivid depiction of a drinker recalls the animated portraits by seventeenth-century Dutch masters like Frans Hals that Manet greatly admired.”

And they have this to say about it in their Handbook of the Collections:

In 1872 Edouard Manet traveled to Holland, and the trip reinvigorated his longstanding appreciation of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting. At the Paris Salon the following year he showed this lively picture of a man enjoying his bock, or springtime beer, that is directly influenced by such images. The warm tonalities and lively handling of paint particularly recall the work of Frans Hals. The painting was well received at the Salon, where the evocation of old master painting styles was much appreciated. This work also presented few of those surprising disjunctions of color to which conventional critics of Manet often reacted violently. Manet’s model, who endured more than sixty sittings, was a neighbor of the artist named Bellot. Christopher Riopelle, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 194.

If you want to learn more about the artist, the Art Archive or the ArtCyclopedia are both good places to start and Wikipedia also has a nice summary. Also the Edouard Manet Gallery purports to have a complete gallery of his works.