La Négresse

In the early 1860s Paris still had a sizeable Black population, and Manet knew one of these Parisians well. Her name was Laure. He jotted her address in a notebook, a third-floor room on the rue de Vintimille, and hired her to sit more than once. Around this time she also posed for the maid who carries the bouquet in his Olympia, the nude that would scandalise the Salon a few years later. Here, though, Laure is nobody's servant. She wears a bright Caribbean head wrap and a fashionable Second Empire gown, and Manet paints her with the loose, flickering touch he reserved for faces that interested him. Her name went unrecorded for a century, and the picture was long known only as La Négresse.