La Nymphe surprise

This is early Manet, painted around 1860, before he was the name that scandalised Paris. The model is Suzanne Leenhoff, a Dutch pianist who had come into the Manet household years earlier to teach the boys the piano. She was a little older than Édouard, their relationship was a quiet secret, and he married her a couple of years after this. She sits half-turned, a bather surprised, in a pose that reaches back through Rembrandt and the old masters Manet studied in the Louvre. He kept it his whole life and seems to have counted it among his own most important works. It hangs now in Buenos Aires, at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Argentina.