Horsewoman, Fullface

Notes taken in Manet's studio after his death say this was meant for the Salon of 1883. He began it the winter before, in his studio on the rue d'Amsterdam in Paris, at a point when walking had become difficult and the sitters came to him. The young woman in the riding habit was a bookseller's daughter and no horsewoman at all. The habit was borrowed from a painter friend, Emmanuel Gallard-Lépinay. Manet tried the subject three times in those last months, shifting the pose and the viewpoint, and this full-face version is the furthest he took any of them, still blocked in as broad areas of light and shade rather than finished. He died on 30 April 1883. When the École des Beaux-Arts mounted a memorial show of his work the following year, this was the horsewoman they chose.