French, 1832–1883

In the traditional Commedia dell'Arte repertoire, Polichinelle, or Punch, is a hunchbacked servant with a volcanic temper and a propensity for violence, deceit, self-interest, and vulgarity. Édouard Manet's rendering of the character shows him in his customary, old-fashioned livery with a comically exaggerated, padded doublet (called a peascod belly) and a menacing baton behind his back. Polichinelle's face, however, resembles that of the newly elected, conservative president of the Third Republic, Patrice de MacMahon—the general who directed the bloody reprisals against the Paris Commune in May 1871. Manet modeled his Polichinelle on an earlier print by the politically and artistically reactionary painter Ernest Meissonier. Manet planned a large edition of his lithograph, which was to be distributed in the liberal newspaper Le Temps, but the police destroyed all of the impressions printed for that purpose. The lithograph to the right is a rare early impression.

_{Édouard Manet. Punch, 1874. The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Tiffany Blake.}