Femme noire aux pivoines

Frederic Bazille painted this in the spring of 1870. That summer France went to war with Prussia, Bazille enlisted in a regiment of Zouaves, and by late November he was dead, killed in a small battle near Beaune-la-Rolande at the age of 28. He had been one of the closest friends of the young Monet and Renoir, often paying their rent, and was just finding his own path. Here he gives the whole canvas to a Black woman arranging peonies in a vase, absorbed in the flowers. Painters of the day usually placed such a figure in the background as a servant. Bazille had surely seen Manet's Olympia, where a Black maid named Laure appears, and this looks like a deliberate answer to it, with the model given the whole centre of the picture.