Lola de Valence

In the late summer of 1862 a Spanish dance troupe was performing in Paris, and Manet, then in the middle of a Spanish craze, got their star into his studio. This is Lola Melea, the company's lead dancer, posed in her stage costume much the way Goya had posed a duchess decades before. The poet Baudelaire, a friend of Manet's, was so taken with the picture he wrote a short, faintly scandalous verse about the black and pink jewel that was Lola of Valencia. When the painting was first shown the lines were printed on a plaque beside it. She stands still between numbers, fan lowered, caught in the pause rather than the dance.