The Naked Truth

Manet's favourite model, Victorine Meurent, has often been dismissed as a drunk and a prostitute. But as V. R. Main discovers, she was actually an ambitious artist

By V. R. Main, The Guardian

Picture the predicament. She is 18, working-class, poor, with a secret ambition to become an artist. He is 30, rich, aristocratic, and a painter. The year is 1862; the setting, his studio in Paris. She is modeling for him, and, as they talk, their ideas merge. Two of the paintings he produces with her will become among the most famous in the world. But the majority of his biographers will ignore her influence. They will say that she was a prostitute and an alcoholic who died young. And, with that damning description, her contribution will be erased from art history.

It was more than a century after Edouard Manet's death that the art historian Eunice Lipton discovered that his model, Victorine Meurent, had actually lived to be 83. And it seems unlikely that she was his grisette—a young woman in a casual relationship with an artist—let alone a prostitute....

READ ON at guardian.co.uk

____________________

David Emerick

(V. R. Main's new book is A Woman With No Clothes On, from Delancey Press. U.K. link.)

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Comments

[Huw]

Fascinating article. It'll be interesting to see how this filters down into art-history courses and textbooks. Le Déjeuner and Olympia are both commonly studied and if memory serves, they are fairly central to the art history courses taught by the Open University, an institution which has always prioritised gender-studies and equality. I'm sure they'll be draughting a re-write!

Interesting post. Thanks.

[javier]

Thanks for pointing in this direction. I did enjoy the text enormously. It's impressive how well The Guardian reports on the arts of late.

[Alex V]

Very well done article on a solid piece of historical research. I do wonder, though, at the juxtaposition of this article, and the domai link. I seek not to file a complaint, but to wonder if any of those models might be in a similar situation.

Alex