Le Balcon

The seated woman with the fan is Berthe Morisot, and this is the first time she appears in Manet's work, in 1868. She was a serious painter in her own right, and here she is one of a group of the artist's friends arranged on a green balcony, along with the violinist Fanny Claus standing beside her and a landscape painter behind them. Manet borrowed the setup from Goya, who had painted women watching from a balcony decades earlier, but he drained out the anecdote, so nobody looks at anybody and no story quite forms. Morisot went on to become one of his favourite models, and in 1874 she married his brother Eugene. Years later the Belgian painter Rene Magritte made his own copy of this scene and replaced every figure on the balcony with an upright coffin, one of them seated in Morisot's chair.