Mackinac Design Company

The Street Singer

Edouard Manet (French 1832-1883)
Museum of Fine Arts Boston

 The forest green shutter style doors are just beginning to swing closed behind her. She is caught for a moment but observed for eternity. A guitar in one hand, a couple of cherries in the other and she is back on the street on the way to her next gig. As one door swings out while the other swings in, she flashes a stare out of the canvas, not sure if she is going to communicate with her onlooker. Her lips, slightly open are ready to eat the ripe red fruit in her hand. This is a glimpse into a fleeting moment in the life of a Parisian Street Singer in the mid-nineteenth century. On this day, Edouard Manet (1832-1883) was her onlooker. He studied the essence of her being and translated it with oil on canvas into his portrait The Street Singer (1862). What Manet succeeded in capturing was her spirit in the confines of citylife in mid-nineteenth century Paris. 

 He approaches her portrait as a dynamic entity. She is on the move. Manet was able to convey this through his handling of paint learned from the study of the Spanish painters Velázquez (1599-1660) and Goya (1746-1828). In Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), the little girl’s dress shows shadow beneath to create a mood of stillness, indicating a stopped moment in time.

But, in Manet’s painting, the shadow under her gray dress is darker, uneven and continuing behind her to enhance the impression that she is in a continued motion. In this way, Manet
\
borrows a studied technique of Velázquez but takes it a step further. Her dress in bunched up in her hand so that she won’t trip while walking to further the reality of and impression of movement. The singer’s body is portrayed as if she could walk right out of the side of the canvas which gives the idea that she is on her way somewhere else. But at the same time she looks to the viewer she appears relatively unconcerned with the viewer. In this way, Manet shows a lack of connectedness in city life and implies the viewer’s lack of importance. Because art had become something patrons often commissioned so that they could engage themselves in a dialogue with, Manet decided to depict a subject that would not have been of interest to upper class but more importantly a person that had no apparent interest in the upper class.

Dimension is created by Manet’s placement of her in front of the swinging doors. His chiaroscuro like shadow behind her directs the viewer to the light of day in front of her. Manet represents her as emerging from the darkness on the inside of a saloon to the light of day outside. Perhaps he is asking his viewers to go out, to look around their world. Manet’s inference of light is also shown on the waiter in the saloon. As the doors swing, light streams into the saloon and draws the viewers eye by the gradation of white highlights on the waiter’s apron and spat. At the same time, he highlights the wooden bistro chair with touches of white, red and yellow to give the impression of light hitting the chair but also the impression of light reflecting back off of the polished wood. The reflection off of the waiter and the chair draw the eye to the long diagonal created by the singer’s dress which shows her body in a pyramid like composition that indicates Manet’s knowledge of classical form and balance.

She is at home in her world. Manet portrays her caught in a fleeting moment while she captivates the viewer with her poise as she is moving away from him. Would her onlooker dare to follow her? This kind of psychological dualism seems to connect Manet to his subject matter. He seems to have wanted detachment and involvement in order to observe and then portray his subject. But perhaps he uses this detachment and involvement to indicate something more. He is also portraying the solitary life of a city dweller. Her yearning blank stare, pale skin and dark clothes would not have been uncommon in a city filled with strangers as it was then and as it is now. In this way Manet captured the timeless solitary essence of city life.

Her hands are rendered like the hands of a guitarist. Long fingers that bend easily showing she is more accomplished than dictated by her portrait’s title. The left hand is bent in a relaxed fashion, which takes years of practice to achieve. Manet was able to see and portray the correct musculature of this guitarist’s hands. The way her palm pushes in while her fingers bend back shows her dexterity and Manet captured this by observation not by imagination. He uses touches of yellow, brown and pale pink to give the impression of her hand structure, skin tone and musculature while in motion. By highlighting the digits with white while using touches of the pinks and browns to indicate her knuckles and her shortly trimmed fingernails, he demonstrates that he observed her carefully. He would have had to be aquainted with a guitarist in order to capture these details and translate this to canvas. She holds her guitar gently with her thumb, index and middle fingers and this is how a confident guitarist really holds her instrument, not gripping but naturally as an extension her arm She is playing a high quality parlor guitar, not an inexpensive production model. The back and sides look to be of Brazilian rosewood. It is not the bright orange mahogany as used on flamenco guitars but the preferred wood for parlor guitars. This indicates two things, she is probably not performing Spanish or Flamenco music but most likely Parlor music, which loosely translated would have been the new or popular music of the day and the music of the middle and lower classes. Manet creates the Brazilian
rosewood by choosing a deep brownish black paint with red highlights. He gives the impression of wood grain, but not by painstakingly painting each line with the fewest hairs on his brush as possible as a Dutch painter would, but from his study of the Spanish masters. His depiction of the wood is similar to the way Goya painted the rifle barrel and stock on the guns in his masterpiece The 3rd of May 1808 (1814). Manet, like Goya found a way to convey reality, with alternating dabs of broken color patterns to give both the impression of wood grain and to show the reflection of light. He paints the ivory binding along the neck of the guitar with lines of white and adds dabs of yellow to show dimension and the outline of the guitar top just as Goya painted the sightlines and silver scrollwork on the rifle barrel. Manet makes the top appear as if it is gleaming in the sunlight that she is walking toward. The variations in color also emphasize the curvature of the instrument. The way Manet used color to show dimension and light on the instrument demonstrate his awareness, observation and ability to translate reality with painterly means.

 Manet’s somber palette reflects the dynamic of the street. This is a portrait situated outside on the gray streets of Paris and outside the constraints of academic portraiture. She is not in her sitting room surrounded by items demonstrating her material wealth but she does not appear poor. The street underneath her feet is not an oriental carpet yet she gracefully glides along it. She is grounded. The saloon doors with forest green paint are not carved oak with gilt decoration. Manet uses these doors to show her stepping out into the world, not confined in a space. The contrast of the deep green set against the reddish walls direct the viewer to the world behind the singer and the world in front of the singer at the same time. Perhaps Manet was asking the viewer to take a good look around themselves-not just from within. Also, the chiaroscuro created by the dark ruby walls, dark green doors, dark shadows under and behind her all work together to help Manet create movement, dimension and direction.

 Her dress may not be colorful but it is well made. During this period the department store came into being with ready to wear fashion. It made quality clothing available to the masses. The class line became more difficult to define as a result. Manet shows her in her dress, complete with a wire underskirt and matching swing coat. By scattering streaks and dabs of brown, green, blue and white on the grayish ground he gives the impression of tightly woven fabric, draping naturally while reflecting light from her outside location. The outline of black piping as trim around the edge and on the collar, cuff and pockets of the swing coat enhance the form, dimension and movement.

 She cradles the cherries in the crook of her left arm like a baby. Manet rendered the bouquet of cherries as if they were a still life. Because Manet studied the art of the 17th century Dutch Masters, he would have known that cherries represented opulence and wealth. A street singer would not have represented a person of wealth then (or now) but Manet challenges the viewer to see her as a person of wealth and taste. Not necessarily a person of material wealth but fruitful nonetheless.

Manet was able to perceive his street singer in psychological terms. He saw and conveyed her as graceful, accomplished and connected to her art just as Manet was connected to his. He understood her life and made no judgements. Any judgements made were pointed directly at the academics. Manet painted her with the same knowledge that an academic would have had. But an academic painter during his day would not have painted a street singer or created a new vocabulary based on the study of past techniques. The academics merely imitated the past. Manet represented his time realistically and created a fresh future for other painters to follow. By painting a full length portrait of street singer he was showing his disdain for the tired subject matter painters were forced to portray at the Academies and to reveal his socialist beliefs. Manet chose to paint subjects that represented his world, subjects he could relate to rather than mythological subjects from the distant past or worse yet, images of or for wealthy society patrons.

Because Manet portrays her in his world, living her life from her connection to her art, he reveals his harmony with his art. Because he made an attempt to understand her life without judgement, Manet saw her soul and translated it to the canvas with paint. He gave her an air of elegance, street elegance. To Manet, elegance was not a class specific characteristic. The lifestyle of working on and in the streets was common during this period. Manet knew this and chose to record it. This painting was not meant to please high society by depicting socialites amongst their material belongings as a show of status but it was to depict a woman, from a socialist’s viewpoint, sure of herself, self employed, solitary and free from the constraints of high society. She is not in service to or bound by anyone or anything.

A street singer usually plays to a diverse audience of passersby comprised of many social classes, but this was no longer the case in Paris. The city became divided into sections according to class. In the 1860’s during the Haussmanization or reconstruction of Paris, she would have most likely played for the workers that were busy rebuilding the streets. Because of the divisionist rebuilding of the city, the streets came to determine the boundaries of class and it is likely she would not have been able to perform on the streets where the upper class resided. Further, the solo guitarist had lost favor during the Baroque period to pianists and violinists performing in large concert halls throughout most of Europe. Although the guitar was still recognized and respected in Spain and America, it was an instrument that found itself the subject of furious intellectual debate during the 1800’s and was often considered degenerate. The classical musicians and their audience refused to recognize the fretted instrument as worthy just as they would have refused to acknowledge the talent of a street musician. The guitarist in Paris would have, due to a lack of printed classical music, been forced by default to play and create the new music of the day. Thus the guitar came to be known as a modern instrument. Manet dared to paint a controversial subject, holding controversial subject matter while eating the fruit of the ruling class.