page_title: Little Lange
section_title: Influences
hierarchical_section_title: Little Lange / Influences
context_page_description: Little Lange is a c.1861 oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet, now on the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. It shows a boy around five years old from the Lange family, who were friends of the artist. Its dark palette is reminiscent of Spanish Golden Age works as well as Antoine Watteau's Gilles. Produced early in the painter's career, the work's execution is sketchy in places and prefigures his later Impressionist work.
context_section_description: Spanish art and culture were in fashion in the Paris of the 1860s, partly due to Eugénie de Montijo's Spanish origins and partly due to a Spanish theatre company putting on folklore shows. Early in that decade Manet copied a number of Diego Velázquez's works in the Louvre - he was his favourite Spanish painter. He also knew other works of his such as Infante Don Carlos from reproductions in Charles Blanc's Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles. The artist's influence on Manet is particularly visible in his Boy with a Sword (1861), who is dressed in 17th century Spanish costume and shown in matching shades which directly refer back to the Spanish painter, although art historians argue that those shades are not solely down to Velázquez's influence - others such as Jan Lauts speak of "Spanish black" in Manet's palette. The boy's gaze and the clothes' style and colours are all directly comparable to Little Lange - both works show a young boy standing in front of a brown background, although Boy is painted in a more classical manner than Lange. 
  Goya was also a major influence on the work, particularly his Portrait of Victor Guye (1810), which also shows a boy dressed in black directly engaging the viewer's gaze in front of a dark background. His Portrait of Pepito Costa y Bonelis also has a boy against a dark background, in a similar pose to that in Lange and with a wooden horse and other toys, which may be echoed in Manet's Lange by the whip and bridle held by the boy. Pepito also shows its subject holding a hat with a red plume, possibly echoed by the red in the bridle of Lange.
  Art historians also consider the work may have been influenced by Antoine Watteau's Gilles, which Manet could have studied in the Louvre, with its life-size face and near-identical pose. Art historians also argue that the hat in Lange refers back to Gilles and that Lange (and even more so The Old Musician) both draw on the melancholy atmosphere of Gilles.
caption: Detail of The Old Musician, to compare to Watteau's Gilles.
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