Victorine Meurent was Édouard Manet’s favorite model. She crops up everywhere: Olympia, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, The Railway – the list goes on and on. There’s even a painting of Victorine dressed as a Matador. She was an artist in her own right, part of the Paris art scene and even had paintings accepted at the prestigious Paris Salon – No “Salon des Refusés” for Victorine!
In all of Manet’s paintings Victorine looks slightly different. Manet had a way of caricature-izing her features and I took to musing about what she really looked like. I started a study from a period photo in one of my painting classes and then thought I’d continue on for a while. I ran into trouble because the harsh contrast on this and other period B&W photos make poor references – she looked different in every photo! I could not easily reconcile the photos with any of Manet’s paintings – and referring to paintings purporting to be her by other artists of the time threw me into total confusion.
My painting may or may not look like Victorine and I’ve decided that trying to establish a forensic likeness from multiple sources is a good exercise in futility. That said, I do quite like my study and I quietly suspect I might have captured something!
Break-a-Brush!
David
“Every new painting is like throwing myself into the water without knowing how to swim.” Édouard Manet
