Music in the Tuileries

Painted in 1862 and now at the National Gallery in London, Music in the Tuileries Gardens is the first great painting of modern urban leisure and the founding work of Impressionism's subject matter even before Impressionism existed as a movement. The painting depicts an actual event in the Tuileries — the afternoon band concerts attended by fashionable Paris — and includes portrait likenesses of Manet's own circle: Baudelaire, Offenbach, the sculptor Barye, Fantin-Latour, and Manet himself in the left foreground.

The canvas presents a dense, deliberately unresolved crowd — figures in the foreground are individualised, those in the middle and background progressively more abbreviated until the rear registers as pure tonal pattern. The dappled light under the trees is rendered with unexpected directness rather than atmospheric gradation. The composition refuses a conventional focal point, spreading attention democratically across the social scene.