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Music Lesson
Edouard Manet French
Not on view
Manet here depicts a friend, the writer and artistic polymath Zacharie Astruc, playing guitar alongside an unknown female sitter holding a songbook. Astruc is said to have learned guitar from the Catalan musician Jaime Bosch; both men participated in the musical evenings hosted by the Manet family and attended by Degas. This painting evokes not only those soirees but also Manet and Astruc’s shared appreciation of Spanish culture. While this work recalls Manet’s first public success, The Spanish Singer (1861), on view in the next gallery, it was not favorably received when it was exhibited at the Salon in 1870.
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