Dame en fourrure

In the summer of 1880 Manet was at Bellevue outside Paris, taking a water cure for the illness that killed him three years later. Standing at a large canvas for hours had become hard, and pastel suited what he could still do, quick, seated, finished in a session or two. He made dozens of them in those last years, mostly of women who passed through the studio.

This is one of them, a young woman in a coat with a fur collar against a loose flowered ground, and no one has established who she is. The first recorded owner was named Guillemet, which produced a guess that she is Jeanne Guillemet, the wife of a Paris clothier Manet knew. His letters to her are too formal for that to sit easily, and the other names put forward rest on no more evidence.

It is the only Manet portrait in Vienna. It was sold to the gallery in 1942 out of the holdings of the Berlin banking family Mendelssohn, and the circumstances of that sale have been examined more than once since the war.