Beggar with a Duffle Coat (Philosopher)
Édouard Manet (French, 1832-1883)
1865–67
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 187.7 × 109.9 cm (73 7/8 × 43 1/4 in.); Framed: 222.6 × 145.1 × 17.5 cm (87 5/8 × 57 1/8 × 6 7/8 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- A. A. Munger Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
This painting and Beggar with Oysters were conceived as companion pieces. Édouard Manet exhibited them together in 1872 alongside paintings of an absinthe drinker and a ragpicker (a collector and reseller of discarded fabric and other refuse) under the collective title The Philosophers. When Manet made the paintings, these “beggars,” as they were then referred to, were being pushed to the physical and social margins of Paris as the city rapidly redeveloped to make way for more bourgeois neighborhoods. Although he was born into an upper-class family, Manet was an outsider to the established French art circles and likely identified with these alienated subjects.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
