La Négresse

For many years this canvas was taken for a study, a first sketch for Olympia, the nude Manet showed at the Paris Salon of 1865 with a Black maid bringing her flowers. Laure, the woman in this portrait, posed for that maid. Only recently has the picture come to be seen as a portrait in its own right. Her name survives thanks to a line in one of Manet's notebooks, where he wrote down a model called Laure, very beautiful, and her address on the rue de Vintimille, a few steps from his studio. She was a young woman with roots in the French Caribbean. In 1999 the art historian Griselda Pollock turned attention to the old title, La Négresse, and to the history behind it. France had ended slavery in its colonies for good only in 1848, little more than a decade earlier. Manet knew the Orientalist pictures of Delacroix and Ingres, full of exotic attendants, and here he turned away from that academic manner. With only a few strokes he caught the expression on Laure's face.