In the decades after 1848, a handful of painters turned from gods and kings to farmhands, factory crews and train passengers. A ragpicker turned away by a Paris jury walked back into a later canvas wearing the same top hat. A portrait of a surgeon at work had its first public showing among the beds of a military hospital.
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How These Were Chosen
Until the middle of the 19th century, the paintings that won honors at the Paris Salon told stories from mythology, the Bible or the lives of kings. The Salon was the state exhibition, and its jury decided what the public could see.
Realism turned to the people a painter could actually meet: farmhands, factory crews, train passengers, a village gathered at a grave. These painters often gave them canvases as large as a battle scene, and juries and critics regularly called the result ugly or vulgar.
The twelve paintings here come from France, Germany, Russia and the United States and span the half century after 1848. Each one gives ordinary people and their work the space once kept for gods and heroes. They run from the least known to the most famous.
12. Édouard Manet, The Old Musician (1862)
At the center of The Old Musician, an old street violinist sits on a low bank at the edge of waste ground, his instrument resting on his knee. Around him stand a barefoot girl holding a baby, two boys, and a man in a top hat and a brown cloak, the tallest figure in the picture. A second old man is cut off by the right edge.
Édouard Manet signed and dated the canvas in 1862, and the people in it had names. The violinist was Jean Lagrène, leader of a local band of Romani musicians, who earned his living as an organ grinder and as a model for artists. The man in the top hat is Colardet, a ragpicker.
Both men lived in Petite Pologne, a poor district near Manet's studio that the rebuilding of Paris was about to sweep away, along with the people who lived there.
Colardet had posed for Manet before, with less luck. He was the hero of The Absinthe Drinker, painted in 1858 and 1859, a canvas the Salon rejected. During a two-year cleaning of The Old Musician, a tracing of that earlier figure turned out to be precisely the same size and shape as the man standing here.
The cleaning also revealed the order in which the picture grew. Manet seems to have painted first only the musician, the two boys and the girl with the baby, and added the ragpicker and the figure at the right edge later. The drinker who had stood alone on a refused canvas came back as one member of a group.
Manet then gave this whole band a canvas about six by eight feet, a surface the Salon expected to see filled with history or myth. The people of a district Paris was clearing away took up the room usually kept for gods and heroes.
At a Glance
Artist: Édouard Manet (1832 to 1883)
Painted: 1862
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 187.4 × 248.3 cm (74 × 98 in)
Where to see it: National Gallery of Art, Washington
About This Painting
What is Manet best known for?
For two scandals of the 1860s. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was rejected by the Salon jury in 1863 and shown at the Salon des Refusés, and Olympia caused an uproar at the Salon of 1865. Late in life he painted A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), now at the Courtauld in London.
11. Jean-François Millet, The Angelus (1857 to 1859)
In The Angelus, a man and a woman stand with heads bowed at dusk in a flat, empty field. A basket of potatoes sits at their feet, a wheelbarrow loaded with sacks waits behind them, and the man's fork is still driven into the soil beside him, left where he stopped in the middle of the row. Something has made them both stop work at the same moment, and it is not in the field.