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In his larger oils of flowers, often painted from bouquets that friends had brought him in his illness, there are darker notes--sometimes literally so, in the enveloping blackness of their backgrounds, against which the voluptuous white petals of a peony stand out like the skirts of a dying ballerina. In a late painting of lilac blossoms in a vase, you can feel the thick darkness--the darkness of Goya, whose work Manet adored--closing implacably on the fragile white blooms. This may have been as near to deliberate allegory as Manet, the arch-Realist, would go. Or it may not: one can't be quite sure.
What were Manet's influences? Like any great painter, he had a whole museum locked in memory. He paid particular attention to Spanish painters--Velazquez, Goya--whose work he mainly knew from prints, until he made the journey to Spain (no picnic for a traveler then) in 1865. Clearly he was much taken by the Spanish still-life painter Sanchez Cotan, and by the tradition of the vanitas--images of objects gathered together to symbolize the transience of pleasure and earthly life. And then, particularly, there was Chardin, the 18th century French master of still life, whose benign and composed presence is palpable in Manets like the Bunch of Asparagus, 1880, with its almost miraculous rendering of the blue tips of the asparagus spears. (It sold, fresh off the easel, to a collector named Charles Ephrussi. Manet felt he had been paid too generously, and with his usual wit he sent Ephrussi a tiny painting of a single asparagus spear, with a note: "This one was missing from your bunch.")
Many of his still lifes were lone objects like that: a half-peeled lemon exposing its snow-white pith, a warty green monument of a melon. But on occasion, especially in the 1860s, Manet would show his full ordering skill in a composition that anticipates what Cezanne came to in the 1880s. Still Life with Salmon, 1866, is such a painting, a wonderful balance between stability and its opposite: you can feel the weight of the fish and the density of the white tablecloth, but the knife in the foreground is precariously balanced, and the blue bowl with a lemon in it has been tipped, self-consciously and for no very apparent reason, toward your eye.
Such choices are nothing but aesthetic. The eccentricity of some of Manet's still lifes parallels the oddity of his large figure-compositions, the sense of incompleteness and off-kilter scale, that the critics of his day hated and later modernists were inspired by. Still Life with Brioche, 1880, is a knockout of a picture, with that pink rose placed on, or perhaps stuck in, the rich yellow interior of the brioche. It's a vision of unshadowed joy in the full life of the senses--taste, smell and sight together. The rest is peculiar fragments: the cropped sides of two green pears, the glimpse of a truncated painting along the top edge and a black-and-white form that, after some peering, resolves itself as part of the head of a cat. Perhaps it is there because Manet loved cats. Or perhaps it is a quotation of the intently gazing cat in Chardin's big picture of dead seafood, The Ray. Or perhaps both.