TASH TALK Report by Robert Gurney, March 2026: Édouard Manet and Music by Lois Oliver

Manet was one of the originators of Impressionism, and was well-embedded in the nineteenth century artistic milieu in Paris. As well as painting, he was part of the set which reinvented many arts such as theatre and literature, as well as all types of music. 

He married his father's music teacher, who was herself a talented musician. Some of his early paintings were of her at her piano. It was also a time of great upheaval in France, with much reordering of Paris by Baron Haussmann, who created the wine boulevards that are such a feature of Paris today. This caused much disruption, and Manet painted many of those displaced, both poor French people and gypsies, many of them street musicians. 

After the disastrous defeat of France by the Prussians in 1870, and then the bloody end of the Paris Commune in 1871, Manet concentrated on paintings of musical soirees and still lives involving musical instruments. 

Our lecturer at between The Arts Society Henley (TASH) this month was Lois Oliver. She is a keen violinist and plays regularly with orchestras including the Endellion Festival Orchestra. She illustrated her lecture with musical interludes of music that Manet would have heard, including one piece written for MMe Manet. 

Addendum: Other themes that Lois introduced

(a) Édouard Manet’s oeuvre is a visual symphony where Spanish rhythms and Parisian melodies collide. His fascination with the "Spanish School" is epitomized by Lola de Valence, a dancer whose poise he captured alongside the haunting guitar strains of Jaume Bosch’s Plainte Moresque. This musicality extended to decorative arts, seen in his vibrant painted tambourines.

(b) Manet’s social circle was equally harmonic; he immortalized violinist Fanny Claus in Portrait of Mlle Fanny Claus, while his friend Emmanuel Chabrier—composer of Impromptu No. 1 in C Major—frequently performed in his salon. Even his darker works, like The Absinthe Drinker or Hamlet and the Phantom, evoke a theatrical, operatic tension.

(c) However, this artistic ecosystem faced a "19th-century AI" crisis - and it's a case of History Repeating itself.  We're hearing a lot about the potential for AI to rob painters, actors and movie-makers of their livelihoods. Well this is a theme that Lois highlighted in her Talk.  During the 1860s, a Sudanese model named Salem (also known as the "Prince of Tombouctou") became popular in Paris posing for painters. Sitting fees were a good source of income for him and many others.  Jacques-Philippe Potteau photographed Salem for his ethnographic collection at the Museum. However, because these photos were "scientific" and widely distributed to libraries and studios, painters began using the photographs as reference material instead of hiring Salem to sit for them in person. Salem reportedly complained that because there were so many photographs of him circulating, he was losing his livelihood. Artists could simply buy or refer to a Potteau photograph to capture his likeness, bone structure, and uniform without paying his daily sitting fee.  Photography was literally the AI of 1860s. Before Potteau, a painter like Jean-Léon Gérôme would have to pay a model for 10 or 20 sessions to get the anatomy right. Once Potteau’s albumen prints existed, the painter could buy a single photograph for a few francs, pin it to their easel, and paint from it for weeks. The model was paid once by the photographer (or not at all if it was for "science"), while the painter saved hundreds of francs in modeling fees.