I began serious research on Paris Red in 2005. But my interest in Victorine Meurent and my connection to the material began much earlier. In 1986, I had a conversation with a friend about Olympia. He was studying art history, and we fell into talking about the painting one day in the dining room of […]
I recently redid my website. In the last moments of finishing the design, I decided I wanted to add a line of text to my home page. At first I thought of saying, “When an artist meets his muse,” but when I typed it, something didn’t feel right to me. I’ve written before about how […]
W. W. Norton sent me the jacket image for Paris Red a while ago, but I saved writing about it until now. I know that things sometimes change while a book is in production, and I didn’t want to be hasty about posting the image. But l’ve loved the jacket design from the start. The […]
My main character in Paris Red is poor. When Victorine Meurent meets Manet, she’s working as a brunisseuse, or a silver burnisher, and she has very little money to live on. She eats as cheaply as she can, buying her meals on the streets, and many days she gets by on bread and soup—soupe aux […]
I always get intimate with my characters. Since it takes me years to write a book, that’s bound to happen—I live with my characters day in and day out. But I also mean that I experience great physical closeness with them. I know what their faces and bodies look like, and I often know how […]
I’ve written before about the importance of green boots in my novel Paris Red. Victorine Meurent wears green leather boots, and they are part of her identity. Today I want to talk about Manet’s fascination with yellow gloves, and how that fascination came to play a role in my novel. Even though the figures in […]
Paris Red will be published by W. W. Norton in the U.S. in April 2015. Right now that seems like a long wait, but I know it isn’t, not in the world of publishing. In one very important way, it is also an ideal time for the book to come out because Spring 2015 marks […]
Researching Paris Red, I read widely about subjects directly and tangentially related to Victorine Meurent and Édouard Manet. Susan Chitty’s book about English artist Gwen John was both helpful and beautifully written. And let me declare here that almost everything I know about Gwen John I learned from Chitty’s Gwen John: 1876-1939. Before I read this […]
Victorine Meurent is best known as Manet’s famous model, but she was also an artist. She exhibited work at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, but the only painting of hers that is known to exist today is the work above, Le jour des rameaux, or Palm Sunday. That simple paragraph might not seem to contain revolutionary […]
The photograph above was taken by Félix-Jacques Antoine Moulin in 1852 and is in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF). Art historian Beatrice Farwell believes the woman in the photo is Manet’s model, Victorine Meurent. Here’s another of Moulin’s photos of the woman Farwell believes is Meurent: In Farwell’s 1981 dissertation Manet and the Nude, a Study in […]
Paris Red: A Novel by Maureen Gibbon 