The Street Singer

WHEN THOMAS DE QUINCEY wrote of “the couch of Orestes” in the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater of 1821, he was calling up two images at once: on the one hand, the barrage of thoughts and dreams that tormented Orestes after his murder of his mother, and at the same time, the tender...

~In late 1862, Édouard Manet (1832–1883) noted in his studio carnet that a model he described as “Laure, très belle négresse” (“Laure, very beautiful black woman”) sat for a portrait in his rue...

~Manet probably painted Victorine Meurent for the first time in 1862. The earliest painting of her, which he never exhibited, was arguably the only time he painted her as “herself” (fig. 63). Of the large-scale, full-length paintings in which she later figured, some represented her in modern...

The flâneur, the purposeful male stroller, was a principal performer in the theater of daily life in Paris in mid-century, if we judge by his importance in writings of the era. A journalist, writer, or illustrator, he looked about with the acute eye of a detective, sizing up persons and events with a clinical detachment as though natural events could tell him their own...