I don’t know if I would have been able to write the story of Victorine Meurent without the work of another artist—and I don’t just mean Manet, the man who painted her over and over. I mean that without the photos of Charles Marville, or Charles François Bossu, I would have had much more difficulty imagining […]
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 […]
Do you see the resemblance that I see? Or am I just in love? How about this: Each age has its own muse—or maybe she keeps coming back. What do you think? All I know for certain is that I love these two women, and am moved by their images and their lives.
This is the kind of corset Victorine might have worn in 1862. The image comes from the Metropolitan Museum costume collection. It also appears to be the style of corset depicted in Manet’s 1878 pastel drawing “Woman Fastening Her Garter.” Or maybe the drawing shows something more like this corset: Victorine Meurent wouldn’t have had money for an […]
“That day I am seventeen and I am wearing the green boots of a whore.” ~ Victorine Meurent in Paris Red
Paris Red: A Novel by Maureen Gibbon 