The Smoker

The Smoker, painted in 1866, depicts a working-class man smoking a pipe — a figure type Manet returned to throughout his career as he explored the social range of contemporary Paris. The subject connects to the tradition of Velázquez's philosophers and water-sellers, humble figures elevated to pictorial dignity through the quality of the painter's attention. Manet's flat, confident brushwork, bold tonal contrasts, and subjects drawn from contemporary Parisian life defined modernity in painting and proved foundational for the generation that followed. The Minneapolis Institute of Art holds this canvas as an example of Manet's engagement with the working-class Parisian types that coexisted with his more celebrated images of bourgeois leisure.

Manet applied paint in broad, confident strokes with little academic blending, the smoker's figure rendered in the tonal simplicity he derived from his study of Velázquez and Hals. The pipe smoke and the sitter's contemplative expression are captured with summary directness, the dark ground setting off the figure in the manner of seventeenth-century Spanish masters adapted to a thoroughly modern subject.