Mulher com Leques

In the early 1870s Paris was in the grip of everything Japanese. Trade with Japan had reopened only a decade or so earlier, and fans, prints and screens were suddenly the height of taste. Manet built this portrait around that fashion. The woman reclining in the dark dress is Nina de Callias, who ran one of the liveliest artistic salons in the city, a gathering place for poets and musicians. Behind her Manet pinned a spray of Japanese fans across the studio wall, the same wall that turns up in other pictures he made in that room. He never exhibited the painting while he lived, keeping it out of sight in the studio. After his death his sister-in-law, the painter Berthe Morisot, bought it at the studio sale.