Painter of the Modern Life is an essay written in 1863 by Charles Baudelaire, who was a French poet, and art critic. Through this work he coined the notion of a flaneur and provided an insight into exactly what it is the flaneur does.
The term flaneur comes from the French verb flanerie, which means, “to stroll”. A flaneur thus is a person who walks the city in order to experience it. Because of the term’s usage and theorization by Charles Baudelaire and numerous thinkers it became a recurring motif in fields of literature, sociology, history and art and has a key role in comprehension, participating, and in representation of the city.
