Beggar with a Duffle Coat (Philosopher)

This painting and Beggar with Oysters were conceived as companion pieces. Édouard Manet exhibited them together in 1872 alongside paintings of an absinthe drinker and a ragpicker (a collector and reseller of discarded fabric and other refuse) under the collective title The Philosophers. When Manet made the paintings, these “beggars,” as they were then referred to, were being pushed to the physical and social margins of Paris as the city rapidly redeveloped to make way for more bourgeois neighborhoods. Although he was born into an upper-class family, Manet was an outsider to the established French art circles and likely identified with these alienated subjects.