The old musician
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| The old musician |
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| Édouard Manet , 1862 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 187.4 x 248.3 cm |
| National Gallery of Art , Washington, DC |
The old musician (Original: Le vieux musicien ) is a painting by the French painter Édouard Manet from 1862. At this time, Manet was influenced by Spanish art. The work, painted in oil on canvas, suggests the influence of Gustave Courbet . With a height of 187.4 cm and a width of 248.3 cm, the work is one of the largest paintings by Manet. It is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC
Image description
The picture shows six people and a toddler in a landscape. In fact, most of the people are real people. The old musician in the middle, who holds the violin in his hand, is Jean Lagrène , who was the leader of a “gypsy” band in the Batignolles district of Paris at the time the picture was made . Behind him to the right is a man in a top hat who is Colardet the rag collector and ironmonger . Cut off from the right edge of the picture is a man in a long oriental robe and turban. It is Guéroult, an old Jew with a white beard, who in the picture represents the figure of the wandering Jew . His position on the edge of the picture illustrates his role as an outsider. On the left edge of the picture stands a young girl with a toddler in her arms. Two boys are standing close together between her and the old musician. Clothes and posture are in the style of Diego Velázquez or Louis Le Nain .
The two men on the right edge of the picture look at the musician, who himself looks into the void. The emotional emptiness of Manet's painting felt "too modern" to the viewer.
Various allusions are incorporated into the picture: the man with the hat corresponds to the painting The Absinthe Drinker , also created by Manet a few years earlier, which is painted in this picture without context. The boy in the straw hat comes from the painting Gilles by Antoine Watteau .
Provenance
The painting was in his possession until Manet's death. At Manet's estate auction on February 4 and 5, 1884 at the Hôtel Drouot auction house , it was listed with lot number 9 in the catalog, but was withdrawn by the family. Then it came into the collection of Gaston-Alexandre Camentron . The art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel acquired the painting in 1897 and sold it on to the art collector Alexandre Louis Philippe Marie Berthier in 1904 . Around 1912 the picture was in the collection of PR Pearson in Paris. In 1913 the Austrian State Gallery bought the painting from Hugo Arnot's Viennese gallery. The museum traded the painting for two other paintings in 1923. These were the works of Marietta by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Bathers by Pierre-Auguste Renoir . After that, the picture came back to Paris and was offered by Galerie Barbazanges (Galerie Barbazanges-Hodebert). At the Manet exhibition in 1928 in the Matthiesen Gallery in Berlin, “Mr. Hodebert, Paris ”. Via the Étienne Bignou Gallery in Paris and the Alex Reid & Lefèvre art dealership in London, the picture entered the collection of the New York-based collector Chester Dale in 1930 . He donated Manet's painting along with other works from his collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1963. He linked the foundation with the requirement to leave the pictures - including The Old Musician - in the museum permanently and not to lend them to other museums.
literature
- Julius Meier-Graefe : Edouard Manet . Piper, Munich 1912.
- Galerie Matthiesen (ed.): Edouard Manet . Matthiesen Gallery. Berlin 1928.
- Theodore Reff : Manet and modern Paris . National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 1982, ISBN 0-226-70720-2 .
- Gary Tinterow , Geneviève Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez, The French Taste for Spanish Painting . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2003, ISBN 1-58839-038-1 .
Web links
- "Édouard Manet, les premières œuvres" (in French). Van Gogh.
- "Édouard Manet (artist), French, 1832-1883, The Old Musician, 1862". National Gallery of Art