Marguerite de Conflans

Manet painted Marguerite de Conflans at least five times over several years. He met her at the musical receptions his wife held, where Marguerite came with her mother, and he kept asking her back to sit. This oval portrait, from about 1876, catches her young and poised, dressed for an evening out. Manet set a mirror behind her to show the figure from more than one side, a device he would use again, far more famously, in the Bar at the Folies-Bergere. The sitter's own daughter kept the picture and left it to the French state, and it now hangs among the nineteenth-century rooms of the museum in Toulouse.