Beggar With Oysters (Philosopher)

By age 30, Edouard Manet had gained recognition at the state-sponsored Salon exhibition in Paris and established himself as the artist to watch, creating new imagery for contemporary works that translated Old Master painting into a modern idiom. Here he looked to the 17th-century Baroque artist Diego Velazquez, whose two paintings of world-weary philosophers (Aesopo and Menippus, both c. 1638) Manet had admired that year at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain. Like Velazquezos representation of the ancient stoics (whose poverty is associated with wisdom), Manet's beggar-philosophers fit into the popular notion of the social outcast as a seer possessing rare insight. This painting and Beggar with a Duffle Coat were probably conceived as companion pieces.