Depicts · 1862
Charles Baudelaire
The National Gallery places Charles Baudelaire in profile between Théophile Gautier and Henri Fantin-Latour, and calls him perhaps the greatest influence on Manet in the 1860s.
Painting
Music in the Tuileries Gardens
A crowd stands and sits under chestnut trees in the Tuileries Gardens, waiting for one of the twice-weekly concerts given there. Édouard Manet put his friends and his own family into the throng and left most of the other faces as loaded dabs of paint. Émile Zola, who saw it on show in 1863, counted perhaps a hundred people in it. It was Manet's first large picture of contemporary Paris, and it never went to the Salon.
- 1862
- Oil on canvas
- The National Gallery, LondonLondon, United Kingdom
About Édouard Manet
What the painting shows
The Tuileries Gardens fill the canvas from edge to edge. Dark trunks rise through the crowd, and the foliage closes overhead except for one ragged opening of pale blue at the top centre. Below that canopy the people are packed into a band that runs the full width of the picture, thinning into a blur towards the back.
Two women in pale cream crinolines sit together left of centre, both in blue bonnets tied with blue ribbon. One of them wears a black veil spotted with dots, painted over her finished face. A dark green folded fan stands between them where their two skirts merge into a single field of cream.
In front, two small children play on the bare earth. One stands in a white dress with a red sash and a red band in her hair; the other crouches in a green tartan wrap and reaches for two small teal pails on the ground. Behind them the garden's iron chairs are drawn in bare ochre line, heart-backed, with scrolls at the centre of each back.
Despite the title, Édouard Manet left the musicians out, and the National Gallery notes it is not clear whether the concert has begun.[1]
The National Gallery dates the canvas 1862. Théodore Duret, who knew Manet and published a catalogue of his work, put it at 1861 and said Manet made open-air studies in the Tuileries that year to compose it.[2] Duret also explains why the crowd is there: the Emperor held court at the Tuileries palace, and music played twice a week in the garden drew a fashionable public.[2]
A group portrait disguised as a crowd
The National Gallery identifies much of the gathering by name. Manet himself stands at the far left holding a cane, his body cut by the edge of the canvas. The man in front, who partly hides him, is the animal painter Comte Albert de Balleroy, with whom Manet had shared a studio.[1]
The novelist Champfleury, a defender of Realism, stands behind and between them. The bearded critic, poet and sculptor Zacharie Astruc is seated close by, with the journalist Aurélien Scholl above him. The composer Jacques Offenbach sits further right in glasses and a moustache, between the artist's brother Eugène Manet and the painter Charles Monginot.[1]
Near a tree above the seated women are the painter Henri Fantin-Latour, who looks straight out of the picture, and the editor Baron Taylor, a promoter of Spanish art. Théophile Gautier leans against a trunk in a brown suit and a full beard. Seen in profile between them is Charles Baudelaire. The painter Frédéric Bazille is in the crowd as well.[1]
The two seated women are identified by the National Gallery as the wife of Jacques Offenbach and the hostess at whose salon Manet had met both Frédéric Bazille and Charles Baudelaire.[1]
Velázquez at the edge of the picture
Manet had recently copied in the Louvre a painting then given to Diego Velázquez, The Little Cavaliers, which shows an imagined meeting of seventeenth-century Spanish artists. Two of its men, thought at the time to be Velázquez and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, stand in much the position Manet gives himself and Comte Albert de Balleroy.[1]
The National Gallery draws the further comparison with Las Meninas in Madrid, where Velázquez sets the viewer in the place of the king and queen he is painting. Manet uses the same device by putting the viewer where the musicians would stand.[1]
Standing at the fringe of the gathering rather than inside it, Manet is in the scene and slightly apart from it. The National Gallery reads that position as the flâneur Charles Baudelaire described, the stroller who belongs to the crowd and watches it from a distance.[1]
What happened at Martinet's in 1863
The painting was never submitted to the Salon. Manet showed it in March 1863 with thirteen other canvases at Louis Martinet's gallery on the boulevard des Italiens, his first solo exhibition.[1] Émile Zola, writing four years later, put the number of canvases at fourteen and said their appearance caused a riot, with whistling and jeering.[3]
Théodore Duret also counted fourteen canvases and named five of them, La Musique aux Tuileries among them. He reported that the show had no success at all, and that visitors found nothing in it but bariolage, a word for a gaudy clash of colours. Duret attributes the term to Paul Mantz, writing in the Gazette des beaux-arts.[2]
Duret draws one further consequence. By putting people out of temper, the Martinet exhibition helped produce the Salon jury's refusal of Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe a few weeks later.[2]
Zola named two pictures as the ones that set the powder alight: Le Ballet espagnol and La Musique aux Tuileries. He then reported what one visitor did about it.[3]
“Un amateur exaspéré alla jusqu'à menacer de se porter à des voies de fait, si on laissait plus longtemps dans la salle de l'exposition la Musique aux Tuileries.”
An exasperated art lover, Zola wrote, went so far as to threaten violence if Music in the Tuileries were left in the exhibition room any longer. Zola said he understood the anger, and then explained it: a hundred people perhaps, moving in the sun, each one a simple patch, barely determined, in which the details turn into lines or black dots.[3]
His answer to the angry visitor was a matter of distance. Zola would have asked the man to stand further back, from where the patches would have come alive and the crowd would have begun to talk.[3]
In May 1867 Manet put around fifty of his paintings, this one included, in a pavilion he paid for beside the Universal Exhibition.[1] Of the fourteen canvases shown at Martinet's in 1863, Zola counted eight on the walls again in 1867.[3]
Painted in patches
The National Gallery describes the method as a mass of dabs and touches of colour, without half-tones or chiaroscuro, the figures spread across the picture like a frieze with no focal point. Only a few faces are brought into focus. The rest are flat, unmodelled, and towards the back simply a blur, with figures cropped at both side edges.[1]
Émile Zola built his whole account of Manet on the same observation. He named Manet, Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet as the only modern painters who obeyed the law of values consistently in their figures. That law, as Zola stated it, means starting from a lighter note than nature and keeping the whole scale in step.[3]
A head against a wall, Zola wrote, becomes no more than a patch that is more or less white on a ground that is more or less grey. The clothes beside the face become another patch of blue or brown set next to it. His summary of the painter was four words: he sees blond, and he sees in masses.[3]
Black does the structural work here rather than describing shadow. The coats and top hats are laid in as flat silhouettes, and the figure standing right of centre is a single unbroken black shape above pale cream trousers.
From Jean-Baptiste Faure to the Lane Bequest
The National Gallery's provenance has the baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure acquiring the painting around 1882, a year before Manet's death, and lending it to the memorial exhibition in Paris in 1884. Faure sold it to the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in 1898.[1]
Durand-Ruel lent it to the Grafton Galleries in London in early 1905, to the Salon d'Automne in Paris that autumn, and to Belfast in 1906. Sir Hugh Lane bought it from him that same year, and it went on loan to the Municipal Gallery in Dublin between 1908 and 1913.[1]
Lane died in 1915 and the painting came to London under his bequest of 1917. It was transferred from the Tate Gallery in 1950. The National Gallery holds it in partnership with the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, and it spent 2019 to 2026 on long loan there.[1]
Close reading
Reading the work, detail by detail
Émile Zola defended the picture by telling an angry visitor to stand further back. Close up it does the opposite of settling down: the faces come apart into loaded dabs, the garden chairs turn out to be drawn in single unshaded lines of ochre, and the black coats stop describing cloth and become flat shapes. Working across the canvas in close view shows a crowd built out of patches, with only a handful of heads brought into focus.
1.The painter is sliced by his own left margin
Two bearded men in black top hats hold the far left. The outer one is cut down the middle by the canvas edge, so only half his coat and half his face survive. The National Gallery identifies him as Édouard Manet and the fuller figure in front as the animal painter Comte Albert de Balleroy. Manet's reddish beard and white collar are painted in a handful of strokes.
2.Two pale gloves, two thin canes
Each of the two men at the left carries a cane, and each hand is gloved in buff. The gloves are put in with three or four strokes and no drawn fingers. The canes are thin lines of ochre laid straight over the dark coat and the trousers behind. Nothing else in that corner is lighter than the coats.
3.A blue bow tied under the chin
The nearer of the two seated women looks slightly to her left, her face turned out of the shade. Her bonnet is blue with a pale lining, and the ribbon is tied in a broad bow under her chin with two long ends down her chest. The face has almost no modelling. It is a flat pale oval with the features set into it in a few dark marks.
4.The veil was flicked on after the face was done
The second woman wears a black net veil over her face, and the dots of the net are separate black marks scattered across finished flesh. Her eyes, nose and mouth are painted underneath and read through them. A blue rosette sits at the side of her bonnet, with a blue ribbon tied at the throat. The veil is perhaps twenty dabs in all.
5.A green fan where two skirts become one
A folded fan stands upright between the two women, dark green with a bone-coloured guard catching the light. A grey-white gloved hand closes on it at the base. Manet gives no boundary between the two crinolines here. The cream runs on unbroken from one woman to the other, so the fan and the glove sit in a single field of pale paint.
6.A red sash and a face left unpainted
The standing child wears a white dress with short puffed sleeves, a red sash at the waist with one long end hanging down her side, and a red band in her brown hair. Her face is left as a pale oval with two dark dabs and a smudge of shadow. At this size she has no features at all, and the red is the strongest note in the lower half of the canvas.
7.Two teal pails on the bare earth
The second child crouches with her back to the viewer, blonde curls above a white dress. A dark green tartan wrap flecked with red covers her shoulders. Her bare arm reaches down to the ground, holding something small and pale. Two teal pails with pale rims stand on the earth beside her, one with a thin dark handle lying across the dirt.
8.The canopy opens once
One irregular patch of pale blue is the whole of the sky. Dark green and olive foliage closes around it on every side, feathering into the blue where the brush was dragged. No leaf is drawn anywhere in the canopy. The trees are flat patches of three or four greens, and the trunks are bands of near-black laid straight down through the crowd.
9.A coat with nothing inside it
The man standing right of centre is seen in profile, in a black top hat above a brown beard. His frock coat is one unbroken black shape. There are no folds, no buttons and no highlight anywhere across it, so the arm and the back exist only as the outline against what is behind. Below it the cream trousers are almost as plain.
10.Where the heads stop being heads
Behind the front rank the drawing stops. Black top hats become plain rectangles with one lighter stroke for the brim, and faces become dabs of pink and cream with a single dark mark for an eye socket. A bearded man in a pale grey round hat with a wide brim is one of the last heads given features. A bright red dab sits beside him, and a yellow straw bonnet below. This is the passage Émile Zola described as figures reduced to patches in which the details turn into lines and black dots.
11.The garden chairs are pure line
The public chairs of the garden are drawn rather than modelled. Each back is a heart shape closed by two scrolls that curl inward to meet at the middle, with a second pair of scrolls at the foot. The whole frame is one continuous ochre line at a single value. The dark paint behind reads as the gap between the bars, so the metal gets no shadow of its own.
12.A parasol made of two flat tones
A furled parasol lies on the ground at the right. Manet gives it two tones and nothing else: a grey-brown plane and a pale grey-white one, split by a straight edge. A thin dark rib runs down the join and the stick continues onto the earth. Beside it a black shoe with a pale sole shows under cream trousers.
13.The colour is loudest where the canvas cuts people off
The right margin carries the strongest colour in the picture. Blue bonnets, a vermilion bonnet trim, a red shawl, orange-gold trim and a pale pink parasol are packed together within a few inches. Faces here are cut in half by the canvas edge, and so is the parasol. Nothing is arranged to lead the eye back in; the crowd simply stops at the margin.
14.The signature sits on the gravel
The signature reads éd. Manet in dark cursive, low in the right corner. It is written directly on the olive-brown of the garden path, under the thin ochre legs of a chair. The canvas weave shows through the ground paint here. Manet put his name at the opposite corner from the half-figure of himself at the left edge.
15.A ball left in the bottom corner
A small ball lies on the earth at the extreme lower right, tucked behind a chair leg. It is painted in three vertical bands: dark green at the left, cream-white in the middle, red at the right. Six or seven strokes make the whole thing. It is the only object in the picture that belongs to the children in the foreground rather than to the adults.
Timeline
1862
Painted, Manet's first large canvas of contemporary Parisian life.
1863
Shown in March at Louis Martinet's gallery on the boulevard des Italiens, with thirteen other canvases, in Manet's first solo exhibition.
1867
Hangs in the pavilion Manet built at his own expense beside the Universal Exhibition, among some fifty of his paintings.
1882
Likely bought by the baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, a year before Manet's death.
1898
Sold by Faure to the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel.
1906
Bought from Durand-Ruel by Sir Hugh Lane, who lends it to the Municipal Gallery in Dublin from 1908.
1917
Comes to London under the Lane Bequest; transferred from the Tate Gallery in 1950 as NG3260.
Where to see it
The National Gallery, London
Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN, United Kingdom
The National Gallery lists the painting in Room 41. It is shared with the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin under the Lane Bequest and was on long loan there from 2019 to 2026, so confirm where it is before travelling.
Plan your visit on the museum’s official website (opens in a new tab)Frequently asked questions
Where is Manet's Music in the Tuileries Gardens?
The National Gallery in London, inventory number NG3260, which lists it in Room 41. The picture is held in partnership with the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin under Sir Hugh Lane's bequest and travels there on long loan, so check before a visit.
Was Music in the Tuileries Gardens shown at the Salon?
No. Manet showed it in March 1863 at Louis Martinet's gallery on the boulevard des Italiens, alongside thirteen other canvases, and again in 1867 in a pavilion he built beside the Universal Exhibition.
Who is in Music in the Tuileries Gardens?
Manet's friends and family. The National Gallery names Manet himself at the far left, Comte Albert de Balleroy, Champfleury, Zacharie Astruc, Aurélien Scholl, Jacques Offenbach, Eugène Manet, Charles Monginot, Henri Fantin-Latour, Baron Taylor, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and Frédéric Bazille.
Why did the painting upset people in 1863?
Émile Zola reported that a visitor threatened violence unless it was taken off the wall. Zola put the anger down to the handling: a crowd of perhaps a hundred people in which each figure is a simple patch, barely determined.
Where are the musicians in Music in the Tuileries Gardens?
Manet left them out. The National Gallery notes that the band is not shown and that it is not clear whether the concert has started; the viewer stands roughly where the musicians would be.
Was Music in the Tuileries Gardens painted in 1861 or 1862?
The National Gallery dates it 1862. Théodore Duret, who knew Manet and published a catalogue of his work in 1902, dated it 1861 and said Manet worked it up from open-air studies made in the garden that year.
What did critics say about it at the time?
Théodore Duret reported that visitors to the 1863 exhibition found nothing in Manet's canvases but bariolage, a gaudy clash of colours, and credited the word to Paul Mantz in the Gazette des beaux-arts. Émile Zola wrote that one visitor threatened violence unless the painting was taken down.
How big is Music in the Tuileries Gardens?
76.2 by 118.1 centimetres, about two and a half feet high by just under four feet wide. Émile Zola, describing it in 1867, put the crowd inside that space at perhaps a hundred people.
In the atlas
Depicts · 1862
Édouard Manet
The National Gallery identifies the painter himself at the far left of the canvas, holding a cane, his body cut by the edge of the picture and partly hidden by the animal painter Comte Albert de Balleroy.
Depicts · 1862
Frédéric Bazille
The National Gallery names Frédéric Bazille among the figures in the crowd, alongside Charles Baudelaire; Manet had met both at the salon of the hostess seated in the foreground.
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References
References
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