Victorine Meurent

She is one of the most looked-at faces in nineteenth-century art, and for a long time that was all anyone thought she was. Victorine Meurent was Édouard Manet's favourite model in the 1860s, the pale red-haired woman staring straight out of Olympia and sitting undressed among clothed men in the Déjeuner sur l'herbe, two pictures that scandalised Paris and now hang in the Musée d'Orsay.

The nickname the studios gave her, La Crevette, the shrimp, fit her small frame. What it hid was that she was training to be a painter herself. She enrolled at the Académie Julian, a private art school that admitted women, and she worked at her own canvases for decades.

Then came a reversal that tells you how the Salon jury really worked. In 1876 the official Salon accepted a painting by Meurent and rejected one by Manet, the man whose model had made her famous. She went on exhibiting there for years, into the next century.

Almost none of her own paintings survive, and for a century she was written off as a drunk who died young, which was false. She lived to 1927 and was 83, still painting in the Paris suburb of Colombes long after the men who had painted her were gone.