A Parisiense

In the 1870s Manet was set on painting his own city exactly as it looked, and that meant fashionable Parisians in the clothes of the moment. This near life-size figure is the actress Ellen Andrée, in a black street dress with a bustle, a hat, gloves and lace-up boots, caught as if crossing a room. She was a familiar face to the painters of the day and would soon sit for Degas's picture of a woman with a glass of absinthe, and for Renoir. Manet gives her no story and no setting, just grey light and the confident stance of a woman whose elegance is her whole subject. He kept the canvas in his studio and never showed it in his lifetime; it reached Stockholm decades after he died.