Artist: Edouard Manet
Date: 1866
Museum: Hill-Stead Museum (Farmington, United States)
Technique: Oil
Edouard Manet never considered himself an Impressionist and refused to show in the seven Impressionist exhibitions held during his lifetime. Nevertheless, he was considered a leading figure in this avant-garde movement. Although he used classical subjects in his early work, he painted them in a new style, seen as irreverent and unacceptable to the art establishment and critics. The Guitar Player exemplifies Manet’s controversial “modern” approach, with its contemporary figure painted on a large canvas; a flat, two-dimensional picture plane; a sharp contrast of dark and light against a neutral background; and no idealized sentiment so prevalent in the accepted hierarchy of historical, religious, and allegorical paintings at that time. In this painting, as in several others, Manet imbued an everyday subject with the dignity and size of an official portrait, a concept that was highly controversial in his day. A year after Manet painted this work, and knowing that he would not be invited to show in the official Exposition Universelle, he mounted his own solo exhibition of 50 works which included this painting along with earlier, often-ridiculed works such as Olympia, Le Déjeuner sur l
Artist |
|
|---|---|
Download |
|
Permissions |
Free for non commercial use. See below. |
 |
This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. However - you may not use this image for commercial purposes and you may not alter the image or remove the watermark. This applies to the United States, Canada, the European Union and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 70 years.
|
Note that a few countries have copyright terms longer than 70 years: Mexico has 100 years, Colombia has 80 years, and Guatemala and Samoa have 75 years. This image may
not be in the public domain in these countries, which moreover do not implement the
