The Street Singer (Manet) instance of painting
The Street Singer is an oil-on-canvas painting by Édouard Manet from 1862, depicting a female street musician standing near the entrance to a cabaret.The painting was inspired by a meeting between the artist and a street singer. Manet asked her to pose for him but she refused, so Manet asked a favorite model, Victorine Meurent, to pose for the work. It is either the first or second of Manet's several large-scale paintings for which Victorine posed. The style of the painting shows the influence of Frans Hals and Spanish masters such as Diego Velázquez.The Street Singer is one of a series of single-figure compositions that Manet painted during the 1860s in which he depicted contemporary "types" at life size, upsetting the convention that such humble genre subjects be painted at a small scale.The painting was donated to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1966.Creation
One day in the early 1860s, Manet and French journalist Antonin Proust were taking a walk to the painter's studio. They saw a woman holding a guitar leaving a café. The artist was amazed by her look and immediately decided to create a painting of her. Manet spoke with the singer and asked her if she would pose for him. The young lady went off laughing and refused. Manet then turned to Victorine as a model for the painting.Description
Manet depicted an itinerant singer in fashionable contemporary dress leaving a cabaret by night, tightly holding a guitar and eating cherries. Victorine is depicted as a blonde, sharp, and plain young woman well known around the Pantheon Mountains. The features of her face are painted more sharply and slimmer than in other paintings. Her forehead is hidden behind her hat which she wears low on her head. Her nose is defined by deep shadows that form a parentheses shape on either side. Additionally, it appears that Spanish painter Velázquez inspired Manet in many ways here, especially in the use of color. Manet emphasized the features of Victorine by using a limited palette. Her chin and cheek are barely visible as they were covered by her right hand. Her upper lip is nearly invisible as it is partly covered by the two little ruby cherries on her ring finger and little finger. According to art historian Stéphane Guégan, the cherries were added as an afterthought. Art historian George Mauner says the woman's confrontational stare and her awkward grasp of the cherries and the guitar, "which seems almost too bulky for her to manage comfortably" produces a self-conscious effect that is unexpected in a genre painting.
type of example of manifestation of representation of