Angelina

When the painter and collector Gustave Caillebotte died in February 1894, he left his paintings by his Impressionist friends to the French state. Officials took well over a year to decide how much of the gift they could bring themselves to accept. Of the four works by Manet, they kept two, The Balcony and this one. So Angelina went on show at the Musée du Luxembourg, the state's museum of modern art in Paris, in February 1897, while the refused pictures went back to Caillebotte's brother. The painting dates from 1865. A woman stands at a balcony rail in a black lace mantilla, holding a black fan against her chest, a pale curtain falling at one side. Manet had shown it once before, in the exhibition of his own work he staged in Paris in 1867.