Provenance

Camentron

French

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Against a hilly landscape and on a patch of dirt, five people wearing tattered clothing gather around a bearded man who holds a violin in his lap in this horizontal painting. Most of them have pale skin. Starting from the left is a barefoot young woman holding a blond baby to her chest. She faces our right, and her chestnut-brown hair hides her profile. She wears a black shirt over a calf-length skirt streaked with slate and aquamarine blue. To the right two young boys face us. The boy on the left of that pair wears a loose white shirt tucked into tan-colored pants and an upturned wide-brimmed hat. The boy next to him has short brown hair and is dressed in a black and brown vest and pants over a bone-white shirt. His right arm, to our left, is slung across the shoulders of the blond boy and he looks off to our right with dark, unfocused eyes. The man who holds the violin is to our right of center. He sits on a stone with his body facing our left, but he turns to look at us with dark eyes under heavy brows. He has tan skin, dark gray, curly hair, and a trimmed silvery gray beard. A wrinkle under one eye suggests he may smile slightly at us. He wears a loose brown cloak with a ragged bottom hem, teal-blue stockings, and black shoes. He holds a violin on his lap like a guitar. One hand fingers a chord on the neck of the violin, which comes toward us, and the other hand holds the bow and plucks a string. A sand-colored bag with a strap lies at his feet. Two men stand to our right of the musician. One wears a tall black top hat, a brown cloak, gray pants, and black shoes. His face is loosely and indistinctly painted but he has a beard. Finally, the sixth person is a man who stands along the right side of the painting and is cut off by that edge. He wears a turban, a black polka-dotted scarf, and a long black cloak or coat. One hand clutches the scarf and the other rests on a wooden cane by his side. His chin and long, light-colored beard tuck back against the scarf, and he looks off to our left with dark eyes. There are loosely painted olive and forest-green leaves in the upper left corner. The landscape beyond is painted with indistinct areas of muted green, blue, and brown. Bits of azure-blue sky peek through puffy white and gray clouds overhead. The artist signed and dated the lower right, “ed. Manet 1862.”
Edouard Manet, The Old Musician, 1862, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.162

The Old Musician

Edouard Manet · 1862 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1963.10.162

We find ourselves on an emerald-green, grassy racetrack as a dusty cluster of horses and their jockeys bear directly down on us in this loosely painted horizontal landscape. Closest to us, three horses run with their legs widely splayed and a fourth brings up the close rear to our left. Only closer inspection reveals a fifth horse nearby, seen over the shoulder of the jockey to our left of center. All the horses are chestnut brown except the second from our right, which is black. The faces of the jockeys are indistinct but they seem to have light skin. The jockey on the left-most horse wears celery and lemon-lime green. The jockey on the nearly hidden horse wears a sky-blue vest with shell-pink sleeves and a pink hat. The jockey to our left in the closest pair, on the black horse, wears silvery-white and his neighbor wears steel blue. Slate-gray fences line the racetrack to either side and beyond both, speckles, flicks, and dots of brown, black, and cream suggest spectators. Pine-green and olive-colored trees touched with specks of yellow and peach fill the background to the right of the track. The trees reach beyond the top edge of the panel, and the sliver of sky above is marine blue. The artist signed the work with blue paint in the lower right corner: “Manet.”
Edouard Manet, At the Races, c. 1875, oil on wood, Widener Collection, 1942.9.41

At the Races

Edouard Manet · c. 1875 · oil on wood ·  Accession ID  1942.9.41