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Edouard Manet (artist) French, 1832 - 1883 The Old Musician, 1862 oil on canvas Overall: 187.4 x 248.2 cm (73 3/4 x 97 11/16 in.) framed: 230.5 x 289.6 cm (90 3/4 x 114 in.) Chester Dale Collection 1963.10.162 |
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During Manet’s lifetime the population of Paris increased fourfold. By the 1860s more than a hundred thousand people were officially listed as indigent, and many more were missed by the census. Napoleon III appointed Baron Georges Haussmann to devise a master plan for the city, giving him a broad mandate and funds for its modernization and revitalization.
The grand boulevards that we associate today with Paris replaced the cramped and irregular streets of the older city, and new railway stations, bridges, and public monuments were built. Many poor sections, such as the Petite Pologne near Manet’s studio, were completely razed. This painting, the largest and most ambitious Manet had yet undertaken, is a catalogue of the people displaced by these renovations: strolling musicians, gypsies, ragpickers, street acrobats, drunks. He presented these dispossessed characters—people he may have seen in his neighborhood—with neutral detachment, arranging them friezelike along the narrow plane of the foreground. They are impassive and silent, connected only by their common poverty and homelessness. A disquieting ambiguity and emotional distance, attitudes that mark Manet’s work, lend a modern feel. Appearing in an open space—recently cleared perhaps?—these people are equally displaced in Manet’s art and in real life.
The seated musician has been identified as Jean Lagrène, leader of a local gypsy band who earned his living as an organ-grinder and artists’ model.
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