A Parisian Lady

In the 1870s Manet was set on painting his own city exactly as it looked, and that meant fashionable Parisians in the clothes of the moment. This near life-size figure is the actress Ellen Andrée, in a black street dress with a bustle, a hat, gloves and lace-up boots, caught as if crossing a room. She was a familiar face to the painters of the day and would soon sit for Degas's picture of a woman with a glass of absinthe, and for Renoir. Manet gives her no story and no setting, just grey light and the confident stance of a woman whose elegance is her whole subject. He kept the canvas in his studio and never showed it in his lifetime; it reached Stockholm decades after he died.