[2][3] The style of the painting shows the influence of Frans Hals and Spanish masters such as Diego Velázquez.

[5] According to a biography written by Margaret Seibert, Manet picked different types of models to fit the characters of the paintings he wanted to pursue.

One day in the early 1860s, Manet and French journalist Antonin Proust were taking a walk to the painter's studio.

[7]Manet depicted an itinerant singer in fashionable contemporary dress leaving a cabaret by night, tightly holding a guitar and eating cherries.

[9] Art historian George Mauner says the woman's confrontational stare and her awkward grasp of the cherries and the guitar, "which seems almost too bulky for her to manage comfortably" produces a self-conscious effect that is unexpected in a genre painting.

In Street Singer, Victorine’s dress is more feminine and French while here she appears to be a male Spanish matador.

[8] The art historian and critic Paul Mantz once said: "All form is lost in his big portraits of women, and notably in that of the Singer, where, because of an abnormality we find deeply disturbing, the eyebrows lose their horizontal position and slide vertically down the nose, like two commas of shadow; there is nothing there except the crude conflict of the chalk whites with the black tones.

"[7] On the other hand, Emile Zola, art critic and Manet’s friend, admired the painting as a “keen search for truth”.