Woman with a Fan

In 1862 Manet was at the height of his Spanish period, painting the dancers of a Spanish troupe then performing in Paris. The same year he turned to a woman from his own circle. She is Jeanne Duval, an actress of mixed race and for close to ten years the lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, Manet's friend. Baudelaire had met her in 1842 and wrote some of his most sensual poems about her. By the time Manet painted her, the affair was over, Baudelaire was still supporting her, and she was paralysed in one leg. Manet let an enormous white crinoline fill most of the canvas, built from many different shades of white, with a lace curtain behind her framing her like a theatre box. Her foot emerges from beneath the skirts, placed in a way that hints at her illness rather than hiding it. The painting reached Budapest during the First World War, when the curator Simon Meller bought it from a private collection in Berlin.