Self-Portrait

In June 2010 a Paris dealer, Édouard Ambroselli, bought a small canvas at the flea market at Vanves, on the southern edge of the city. It was a self-portrait of a red-haired woman in her early thirties, a dark flower in her hair and a yellow wrap slipping from her shoulder, glancing sideways out of the picture the way a painter looks into a mirror. At the upper left it was signed V. Meurent. The face was already one of the best known in French painting. Victorine Meurent had posed for Manet from about the age of 18, and his pictures of her are in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which owns his Street Singer. Her own paintings had almost all disappeared. In 1876 she exhibited a self-portrait at the Paris Salon, perhaps this one. The Museum of Fine Arts bought the canvas in 2021. It was the first painting by Meurent to enter a museum collection outside France.