Behind the model’s joy, the portrait hides the tragic fate of Alexandre, Manet’s assistant, who committed suicide at the age of 15 in the painter's studio on Rue Lavoisier. This episode inspired Charles Baudelaire to write a short story dedicated to Manet entitled La Corde, initially published in Le Figaro in 1864 and later in the compilation Le Spleen de Paris.

This youthful work, whose inspiration derives from Caravaggio and seventeenth century Dutch genre painting, falls within a realist tradition of representation, with a stone parapet delimiting the composition space. Into the immediate subject matter of the painting, portraiture, Manet incorporates another, still life, with the cherries an allegory of the senses evoking Ribera. The composition also contains a concept of modernity underlying the representation of daily life as a painting subject, within a Baudelairean viewpoint of affirming contemporary reality. Manet later reworked the boy’s hands, which reveal a plastic and stylistic quality characteristic of later works.