A Visual Analysis of Édouard Manet's The Ragpicker

As a critical figure between the art movements of Realism and Impressionism, Edouard Manet explore subject matters and styles that his contemporary peers dared not to touch. In the Norton-Simon Museum is where Manet's painting, The Ragpicker, painted in 1865-70, is exhibited. The Ragpicker is a portrait painting of a homeless man who salvages rags from garbage that he finds on the streets, collecting them to sell to paper manufacturers. The painting demonstrates the artist's preference for Bohemian subject matters, an interested piqued by his friend, Charles Baudelaire, and the employment of a 'modern' art style that is commended by his critical supporter, Émile Zola. I will also investigate the significance of viewing the painting in person and how that experience transforms the viewer's perspective of The Ragpicker.

Influenced by Charles Baudelaire's involvement with Bohemia and encouragement to discover 'modern beauty,' Manet explores Bohemian-type characters in The Ragpicker and chooses a ragpicker, or chiffonnier in French, as a topic of exploration. 1860s French society's chiffonnier can be considered similar to today's homeless man who collects bottles and cans to turn them in to recyclers for cash. The ragpicker and homeless man are remnants that are left behind from a productive and rapidly churning modern and urban city. The chiffonnier lives on the margins of and is forgotten by modern society.

The painting belongs in a series that include The Old Musician, painted in 1862, and The Absinthe Drinker, painted in 1859. In the series, he portrays characters that are regarded by

modern Parisian society as social rejects and misfits. Examples of these characters that Manet

explored in his paintings include an old musician that travels from town to town and plays music

for petty change, a group of orphaned children that has is raised by the streets, and an unemployed man who does nothing but drinks absinthe, a highly alcoholic drink, all day.

The overall subject matter of The Ragpicker discusses the effects of modernity in Paris, France. Manet reveals the existence of poverty and the type of people that get left behind as France becomes more industrialized and urbanized. The concept of leisure time becomes more popular and widely obtainable, but it is at the expense of many Bohemian-type figures that are poor or live in poverty, such as the young ballerina who dance for entertainment in the opera but also have to serve as a mistress to many top hat-wearing men.

Furthermore, The Ragpicker is reminiscent of Gustave Courbet's The Stonebreakers, painted in 1850. In the Realist genre painting, Courbet reveals a truth about life in the country: the harsh reality of the poverty that plagues many country folks. Manet, with a similar purpose to Courbet, reveals the gritty underbelly of modern Parisian society. Manet and Courbet stand distant among their artist peers who often glorify the countryside or the city.

Many of the subject matters that Manet delved into are heavily inspired by his friend, Charles Baudelaire, an author and poet. In his works, Baudelaire writes about Bohemia and Bohemian-type people. They are described as outsiders that are cast aside by modern society. He believes that these beings that "drift about in the underworld of a great city," are a great and rich topic of exploration by contemporary artists. These existences include criminals, prostitutes and 2

orphaned street children – people who exist on the socioeconomic periphery of modern society.

In 'On the Heroism of Modern Life,' a segment from his art review Salon of 1846, Baudelaire 3

criticizes the obsession with history paintings and art that idealizes the past. Baudelaire believes

that the old age has their own particular emotions and beauty. He advocates that their current

time is also rich with sublime themes and that contemporary artists should reflect and explore

modern issues and private subjects in their paintings. Baudelaire discuss the 'modern beauty' that 4

which includes the phenomenon of seen and being seen, the dress of fashionable clothing to

impress onlookers and satiate their gazes and the upkeep of a social life. These subjects are

ubiquitous throughout the city, but they are often not noticed. Baudelaire advocates that artists do

not have to look to the past for fascinating subjects to be explored or complex emotions to be

discovered, and that contemporary artists should be responsible to capture the new, rapidly-paced, fleeting atmosphere of modern Paris. After at least a decade, it is Manet who first takes on Baudelaire's challenge.

While urban realism remains the main subject matter, Manet's The Ragpicker also utilizes a 'modern' painting style. His media for The Ragpicker is oil on canvas, a medium that all artists of his generation uses. He learned from his academic training in the School of Art in Paris that to be considered a real artist, you must do what the training has taught you. This type of enforced training and knowledge includes the acknowledgement of the hierarchy of the genres, with history painting being the most prestigious, as well as understanding that artists must paint with a

certain material on a specific surface. However, his academic origins were set aside when Manet

began to allow his eyes to guide his paintings.

His painting style is praised and accredited by Émile Zola, an art critic. Zola describes Manet's painting style as seeing in terms of "light, colour and masses." His style involves 5 flattening out form, simplifying the shape of certain elements, painting quickly and making specific and purposeful elements pop, emulating the vibrant, artificial and rapid-paced essence of the city of Paris. By simplifying elements in the painting into patches of color and a few simple lines, that face or hand would stand out against the background. Zola claims Manet strictly obeys the 'law of values' when painting people and usually paints in a higher key that adds a luminescent lighting to the canvas. The quick impression that Manet captures would be 6 accurately perceived from a short distance away from the painting.

Looking at The Ragpicker, the background, or lack thereof, is obscure and artificial. It is only a backdrop of brown, with splotches of dark and light brown that may denote the shadow and light from a studio lighting. Artificiality is another element that Manet employs in the setting, lighting and composition in his paintings. This artificiality can be attributed to Manet's priority of carefully constructing an optical experience rather than executing an accurate and authentic scene.

He also simplifies the shadows on the ragpicker's hands into a single shape with a shade that is darker than the ragpicker's skin tone. The figure's beard is not detailed and appears as if it was painted with a few flicks of the wrist. The dirt stains and wrinkles seems to have been applied in the same manner with short and long brush strokes worked over. With this style, the texture and directionality of the brush strokes become evident in the painting.

Similar to his artist peers who would go to great lengths for their painting, Manet would put in similar effort to execute his vision for The Ragpicker. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, with his1872 painting The Pont Neuf, asked his brother to stop people on the street to chat with them so that Renoir could paint their still figures from a balcony. Similarly, Manet most likely used primary sources for The Ragpicker. He most likely asked a real ragpicker who roams around the streets of Manet's studio to pose for his painting in exchange of money.

Manet's art style is acclaimed by Zola to be the new, 'modern' style of painting. A 'modern' style of painting is not intellectually worked over, is about contemporary subjects rather than about historical or mythological events and is about the optical experience of how the eyes group colors into shapes and line, capturing the impression of a scene, also known as the effect. 7

He advocates that Manet is providing a new outlook of nature, a feat that Zola claims only a great and original artist can accomplish. With the support of Zola, Manet's style of art will influence his peers and later generations of artists to accomplish the same feat.

Viewing The Ragpicker first-hand is an entirely different experience than learning about the optical experience and painting style of The Ragpicker in a classroom. If this painting is shown in a classroom, it would be presented as a photo that must fit into the standard 16:9 size of the screen and would be the same size as the other works of art discussed. This leaves little to the imagination as to the actual entity of the painting itself, including its size and texture of the paint

and canvas.

The Ragpicker is the most prominent painting seen at the end of one of the hallways in the Norton Simon Museum. Viewers cannot help but be mesmerized by the sheer size of the work of art. When walking closer to The Ragpicker, the viewer can perceive the moving glare of the glaze and how the painting consumes most of the viewer’s vision, making up almost the height of the wall. The large size of the painting reveals how broad Manet’s brush strokes are and how his whole arm and body must have been active when painting.

Viewing the work of art in class compared to in person are two entirely different experiences. In person, viewers can understand how the artwork is made by putting themselves in the shoes of the artist to imagine the struggles of painting on a very large canvas. The viewer can also observe details that aren’t perceptible on a projected mirage of pixels. Details of the directionality and movement of the brushstrokes suggest the Manet's quick and broad painting style and technique.

In conclusion, The Ragpicker embodies the essence of Edouard Manet's career as an artist and pivotal figure between the Realist and Impressionist art movements. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire's Bohemia writings and experience, the painting's subject matter of a Bohemian-type

homeless man ultimately allow the intentions of realism to expand to urban topics. The Ragpicker's 'modern' painting style that reflects the fast-paced, urbanized society will influence successive artists to employ a style of painting that expresses their perspective of nature rather than using a learnt academic method. I also explored how The Ragpicker is perceived in an entirely fresh light when taking the artwork from a projected screen to a vast wall in a museum.

1 Courbet stands in contrast with other Realist artists such as Jules Breton and his painting, The Gleaners, and Rosa Bonheur and her painting, Plowing in the Nivernais. These artists glorified lifestyle in the country to paint the country as better than the city. In the same manner, Manet stands in contrast with artists like Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir who expresses the brighter and more romantic side of modern Paris, ignoring its gritty underbelly.

2 Harrison, Charles, et al., Art in Theory, 1815-1900: an Anthology of Changing Ideas, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 303.

3 Harrison, et al., 303.

4 Harrison, et al., 304.

5 Harrison, et al., 559.

6 Harrison, et al., 559.

7 This technique is also employed in many of his other paintings, including Lola of Valence, painted in 1862. Manet flattened out the form of the figure's arm and simplified the shape of the flowers on the dress into blobs of red and maroon. By wanting his figures to be perceived quickly, Manet applies an optical experience to be perceived by the viewers.

Bibliography

Harrison, Charles, et al. Art in Theory, 1815-1900: an Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford:

Blackwell, 1998.