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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 Not on View |
In a review of the 1846 Salon, poet and critic Charles Baudelaire urged artists to depict "the Heroism of Modern Life." Manet embodied Baudelaire's urbane painter of contemporary Paris. Emperor Napoleon III ordered the renovation of Paris under the direction of Baron Haussmann, and early in the 1860s the slum where Manet located his studio was being razed to accommodate the planned broad, tree-lined boulevards which still characterize the city. In the painting, Manet represented a strolling musician flanked by a gypsy girl and infant, an acrobat, an urchin, a drunkard, and a ragpicker -- individuals the artist might have observed near his studio. The seemingly casual gathering is composed of the urban poor, all dispossessed by Haussmann. Neither anecdotal nor sentimental, Manet studied them with the careful neutrality of an unbiased onlooker, and the distinctly modern ambiguity and detachment of The Old Musician are characteristic of all Manet's work.
By placing pigments side by side rather than blending tones, Manet could preserve the immediacy and directness of preliminary oil studies in his finished works. Effects produced by this technique were sharper and crisper than those obtained with academic method. When they first encountered Manet's work early in the 1860s, future impressionists such as Monet and Renoir admired his manner of painting and emulated Manet as they forged the style known as impressionism.
From the Tour: Manet and His Influence"It was the homeland, at ten pence a night, of all the street organ players, of all the monkey tamers, of all the acrobats and of all the chimney sweeps that swarm the streets of the town." Such was a contemporary description of the neighborhood of Petite Pologne, close to Edouard Manet's studio.
Here Manet has painted characters from this area he called "a picturesque slum." Most are real individuals. The seated musician is Jean Lagrène, leader of a local gypsy band who earned his living as an organ grinder and artist's model. The man in the top hat is Colardet, a rag-picker and ironmonger. At the right a man named Guéroult is cast as the "wandering Jew," the prototypical outsider. In their poses and dress, several figures recall those of Velázquez or the peasants painted by French seventeenth-century artist Louis Le Nain, whose works Manet would also have seen during his studies in the Louvre.
Impassive and silent, these people from the margins of Parisian life are restricted to the narrow plane of the foreground. Presented with neutral detachment, they do not interact, appearing equally unconnected to each other and the vague, undefined setting they inhabit. The urchin and rag picker look toward the seated musician, but he is unaware, focused instead on the viewer outside the picture. The emotional blankness of Manet's painting felt "modern" to contemporary viewers.