The Spanish Singer

Guitarists spot the problem at once. Manet's life-size singer plays left-handed on a guitar strung for a right-handed player, and his fingering suggests a model posing rather than a musician playing. It is a beautiful study of a performer's absorption that gets the instrument wrong. None of that bothered Paris. This was the picture that got Manet into the Salon for the first time, in 1861; it was hung high at first and moved to a better spot because visitors liked it, and Théophile Gautier praised its bold brush while calling the sitter a guitarist from Montmartre rather than Spain. It has been at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1949.