In the Conservatory

An 1878-1879 oil painting by the French painter Édouard Manet, showing his friends Jules and Marguerite Guillemet seated together in a Parisian conservatory at 70 Rue d'Amsterdam that Manet used as a studio. The woman, in fashionable dress, is seated in the foreground while the man leans on the bench behind her, and the pair's physical distance and averted gazes have led critics to read a psychological distance between them despite their visible wedding rings. Shown at the Paris Salon of 1879, the painting's careful, conservative finish surprised critics accustomed to Manet's looser brushwork. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/