A Good Smoke: Manet’s The Smoker in Context of His Portraiture

Agnes Lynch Anderson and Roger Anderson Lecture

Lecturer: Lawrence W. Nichols

Aggressively painted and remarkably immediate, Edouard Manet’s The Smoker, for which the painter took fellow artist Joseph Gall as a model, is one of the gems of the MIA’s European paintings collection. Recently lent to the exhibition “Manet: Portraying Life” (Toledo / London), the painting is both a portrait and an authentic image of 19th-century Parisian life.
Nichols will assess Manet’s pictorial sources for The Smoker in images of smokers in 17th-century Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish painting. Nichols will also consider the impact of photography on Manet.
Nichols is the William Hutton senior curator of European and American painting at the Toledo Museum of Art. He is also TMA’s curatorial liaison to The Apollo Society, and serves on the Domestic Indemnity Program Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts.

$10; $5 for MIA members; free for members of the Paintings Affinity Group. To reserve tickets, call (612) 870-6323 or reserve tickets online »