The Old Musician

The Old Musician is a large painting from 1862 with which Édouard Manet placed himself at the center of the artistic debate of his time. Its generous scale and its oil on canvas execution reveal the painter's ambition, and the work shows both his interest in Spanish art and the influence of Gustave Courbet. Unlike the tradition that focused mainly on peasants, the protagonist here is the urban lower class, in a Paris reshaped by Haussmann's renovations, which had demolished entire neighbourhoods to make way for boulevards and bourgeois buildings.

The scene gathers seven ragged figures in front of an undefined landscape. Many of them were real people whom Manet observed in a poor district on the outskirts of Paris, probably the Petite Pologne area near his studio. The seated old man at the center, violin in hand, was a musician from a traveling family settled in Paris who, after an injury on a construction site, made a living as a hurdy-gurdy player and as an artists' model. For a time he was notably well known. Behind him stands a man in a top hat, and at the right edge an old man in an eastern robe and turban, cropped almost out of the frame, whose marginal placement seems to suggest his status as an outsider.

The most striking feature is the figures' attitude. They remain motionless and do not interact, with a neutral detachment that contemporary viewers found modern. Only the dark-clad boy and the rag collector look toward the musician, who gazes straight ahead, beyond the viewer. Manet also includes deliberate quotations: the top-hatted man reappears from another of his paintings, the straw-hatted boy recalls Watteau's Gilles, and the old man evokes Velázquez. Rather than telling a story, the picture works as a set of references gathered on a single canvas.

The work passed through many hands before reaching the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which received it in 1963 as part of Chester Dale's donation, on the condition that it remain permanently in the museum.

Painter

Édouard Manet

Date

1862

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

187 × 248 cm

Museum

Galería Nacional de Arte, Washington, D.C.

Genre

genre art

Depicts

top hat, musician, child, violin

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