The Street Singer (Manet)

The Street Singer (1862) by Édouard Manet

The Street Singer is an 1862 oil-on-canvas painting by Édouard Manet depicting a female street musician near the entrance to a cabaret. It measures 171.1 x 105.8 cm (69 x 43 in.) and is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The painting was directly inspired by a meeting between the artist and a street singer one night. Manet asked her to pose for him but she refused, so Manet asked a favorite model, Victorine Meurent, to pose for the work. The Street Singer is either the first or second of Manet's several large-scale paintings for which Meurent posed.^[1][2] It depicts an itinerant singer in fashionable dress leaving a cabaret by night, clutching a guitar and eating cherries.^[3] The style of the painting shows the influence of Frans Hals and Spanish masters such as Diego Velázquez.^[2]

The Street Singer is one of a series of single-figure compositions 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.^[2] The 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 unexpecting in a genre painting.^[1]

The painting was donated to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1966.^[4]

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