Bust of a Woman (Madame Bourdin)

We know this woman only by a name attached to the picture long ago, Madame Bourdin, and almost nothing else about her has come down to us. Manet painted her in 1870, in Paris, in the last months before the Franco-Prussian War broke up his world and scattered his household. It reads as a rapid head-and-shoulders study rather than a formal commission, the kind of quick, close portrait he liked to make of people passing through his circle. She turns a little to one side, caught at conversational distance. The canvas is modest, a little under 60 centimetres tall. It later entered the Basel collection of Rudolf Staechelin, a Swiss businessman whose French paintings still draw crowds to the city today.