Die Straßensängerin

Manet said the idea came to him on the street, when he saw a singer leaving a cheap cabaret with her guitar and asked her to pose. She refused, so he brought in a young model he had just started working with, Victorine Meurent, then 18. It was her first appearance in his art, before the scandals of Olympia and the picnic that would make her famous. He paints her stepping out through a swinging door, guitar tucked under one arm, lifting cherries to her mouth from a paper cone. Academic critics found the loose handling and the ordinary subject crude when it was shown in 1863. His friend the novelist Zola saw the point of it, and admired the way it met plain modern life head on.