Rounding the corner of a crowded cafe, sporting a top hat, dark suit, and dress shoes, Manet’s Promeneur is the quintessential flâneur–a modern all-seeing, elegant, but impenetrable man-about-town strolling the streets of Paris with a swift step and averted gaze. Though Manet would be celebrated as a leader of the group of artists that became known as the Impressionists, he never participated in any of their eight independent exhibitions, organized between 1874 and 1886 (see fig. 1). Still, this intimately scaled and confidently executed scene of la vie moderne epitomizes the Impressionist ambition to capture quotidian moments from everyday life.
Likely executed in Manet’s final studio, at 77 rue d’Amsterdam, the canvas is primed with a light-colored ground, recalling the artist’s pastel portraits of friends, patrons, and fellow painters realized in the last five years of his life, a period in which he was suffering from chronic illness and limited mobility due to complications of tertiary syphilis. While the majority of Manet’s sitters were women, he realized several striking portraits of men (see figs. 2-4).
Fig. 3 Édouard Manet, Antonin Proust, 1880, oil on canvas, Toledo Museum of Art
Fig. 4 Édouard Manet, Portrait of Monsieur Brun, circa 1879, oil on canvas, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
The contours of the man’s cost.mes were first drawn in black with a dry brush, delineating the shape of the suit, hat, face, and shoes in profile. Looser passages of calibrated grays convey the weight of his coat, the length of his pants, and the pocket into which he slips his hand, defined by a few strokes of flesh colored paint over which two dabs of gray-black register the resulting disruption to the man’s jacket. The face and distinctive mustache are composed of more substantive short strokes, with touches of pink to distinguish the ear and a single stroke of gray to catch the gleaming silk of the man’s top hat. The background, architecture, and street are sketched in with touches of white, brown, green, and gray but punctuated by flashes of bright orange, muted yellow, and fiery red for flowers in the window boxes and poking in at upper center from an unseen balcony above. Out on the street, Manet's scene shifts attention from within the cafe to the passerby, a figure often relegated to the margins, as in Edgar Degas’ pastel Femmes à la terrasse d'un café le soir (1877), where a passing gentleman beyond the terrasse is cut off by one of its imposing columns (see below).
Manet’s signature, dashed in black at lower right, confirms that he considered the work to be finished. The painting was sold in the artist's lifet.mes
, perhaps directly by Manet himself, to Olivier Sainsère, a jurist, politician, and noted collects
or who bears a resemblance to the Promenuer. Upon his death in 1923, the painting passed to his wife, Anne Marie, and then to another private collects
ion where it remained until the early 2000s.