Woman with a Parasol

Early in 1872 the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel went to Manet's studio and bought 23 paintings on the spot for 35,000 francs, then came back a few days later for more. Manet had been borrowing heavily from his mother, and the money changed his year. That summer he moved into a large new studio, a former fencing hall on the rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, and this head of a young woman was probably painted there in the months that followed. The sitter is almost certainly Alice Legouvé, a model who turns up again in Manet's croquet party of 1873 and in a portrait he made of her in 1875. A blue parasol rests against her shoulder, and she wears black with a pink bow at the throat. For decades several Manet books reproduced the picture the wrong way round, as a mirror image.