Young Woman in Pink

Manet's estate inventory of 1883 lists this canvas as a little woman in pink, with the name Jeanne beside it. Most scholars now take the sitter to be Rosita Mauri, the Catalan ballerina who joined the Paris Opera in 1878 and whom Antonin Proust, a schoolfriend of Manet's, brought to the studio. Manet painted her in a morning gown rather than on stage, and left most of the figure as a few strokes of pink. The picture belonged to the Berlin manufacturer Bernhard Koehler, and in the war his heirs put it into the store of the Nationalgalerie. Soviet trophy brigades took it to Moscow in 1945, where it stayed in closed depots for about 50 years. The Pushkin Museum first showed it publicly in the 1990s.