Portrait of Madame Brunet

This is early Manet, from 1861, before the scandals that would make his name. He was still a young painter courting respectable commissions, and Madame Brunet was one of them. By his own account, when the sitter finally saw how he had rendered her, she burst into tears and left the studio with her husband, refusing ever to look at the portrait again. She thought it made her ugly. Manet thought it honest, and he was not about to prettify a face to order. The rejected canvas stayed with him until he died in 1883. At some point he took a knife to it, cutting away the lower half, so that a full-length figure became the bust you see now.