Nana

In 1877 the Paris Salon jury refused this painting, and the reason was the woman herself. She is a courtesan, caught half-dressed at her mirror with a top-hatted gentleman waiting on the edge of the frame, and Manet lets her turn away from him to face us instead, powder puff in hand, entirely unbothered. Respectable Paris was not ready to see the sex trade shown this plainly, or this cheerfully. The model was a real woman, Henriette Hauser, a well-known courtesan of the day. Three years later Emile Zola published a novel about a character with the same name, so the two are often linked, though the painting came first. That waiting man, cropped almost out of the scene, is the one part of the room she is ignoring.