File:The Old Musician by Edouard Manet (4991505941).jpg

The Old Musician, 1862 by Edouard Manet, oil on canvas

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.