Audio Stop 210

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Edouard Manet

The Old Musician, 1862

West Building, Main Floor - Gallery 89

The Old Musician features a motley group of the urban poor of Paris: a ragpicker wearing a battered top hat, a turbaned man, three children, one of whom carries a baby, and a wandering musician. These characters are set against an undefined background that has been identified as a slum on the edge of Paris known as Little Poland. Édouard Manet’s choice to depict on such a grand scale the people who had been uprooted by the modernization of Paris under Baron Haussmann seems to introduce an element of social commentary. Yet the lack of interaction among the figures and the ambiguity of the setting deprive the painting of a conventional narrative, rendering its ultimate meaning opaque.

MARY MORTON:
This is one of Manet’s great early paintings. He’s thinking about Old Master painting, but he is also responding to what’s happening in Paris at the time.

It pictures a group of people that seem to have been displaced, isolated figures on the fringe of society. They’re inhabiting a kind of liminal space, really a nowhere-land.

NARRATOR:
The social effects of Baron Haussmann’s dramatic modernization were staggering, forcing large numbers of urban poor to the bleak, semi-rural outskirts of the city.

MARY MORTON:
You have a girl in rags, to the left, holding a baby; this little pair of street urchins in baggy clothing; the old musician, dressed in dirty, tattered clothes, who is perched on an old suitcase. He’s looking out at you as if to make you accountable, a direct form of public address, a strikingly modern strategy on Manet’s part.

And then to the right is a figure whom Manet had portrayed in another canvas, a rag picker by trade. He lived near the Louvre and people would have recognized him because of that fantastic silk top hat.

Then this extraordinary psychological tenor of the scene. no one is looking at one another.

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