Mademoiselle Victorine in the Costume of an Espada

ÉDOUARD MANET GREW up on the rue des Petits-Augustins (now the rue Bonaparte), more or less across the street from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts he never attended. The address was a short walk down the quay and across the bridge from the Palais de Justice where Manet’s father worked; indeed, many judges and magistrates lived nearby. As a family of a certain social standing,...

~In 1860, when sales of carte de visite portraits were soaring thanks to the mass production of views of contemporary celebrities, the Goncourt brothers discussed with the caricaturist Gavarni what the future direction of his portraits should be. Gavarni told them that “he wanted to...

~Like many a fellow Parisian, Manet enjoyed fancy dress and make-believe. Writing of a party in honor of Zola, George Moore remembered, ‘Manet had persuaded me to go to the Bal de l’Assommoir dressed as a Parisian workman, for he enjoyed incongruities, and the blouse and the casquette, with my appearance and my accent, appealed to his imagination...

~Manet probably painted Victorine Meurent for the first time in 1862. The earliest painting of her, which he never exhibited, was arguably the only time he painted her as “herself” (fig. 63). Of the large-scale, full-length paintings in which she later figured, some represented her in modern...