Unfinished Homage: Manet's Burial and Baudelaire

Abstract

Art historians have long speculated that Manet's unfinished painting The Burial might be linked to the 1867 funeral of Baudelaire. The article presents evidence that the vantage point Manet used was well known both as a scenic spot and as the neighborhood of the ragpickers described in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and shows how Manet's representation of a funeral was inflected by Haussmann's controversial proposal to build a new necropolis outside Paris. Finally, the friendship of Manet and Baudelaire is reexamined in the course of considering the possible forms a homage to Baudelaire might (and might not) take.