ヴィクトリーヌ・ムーラン

In 1862 Manet stopped a young woman on a Paris street, struck, he said, by her unusual look and her decided air. She was 18, red-haired, so small that friends called her the Shrimp, and her name was Victorine Meurent. This is the first time he painted her, plainly, as herself. Within a couple of years that same face would stare out of Olympia and the Dejeuner sur l'herbe and hand Manet two of the loudest scandals of the century. People assumed she was just a pretty model who later vanished. In fact Meurent trained as a painter and showed her own work at the Paris Salon in 1876, in some years when Manet's own submissions were refused.