Victorine Meurent

Infobox Painting|

---

title=Portrait of Victorine Meurent
artist=Édouard Manet
year=1862
type=Oil on canvas
height=42.9
width=43.8
city=Boston
museum=Museum of Fine Arts

Victorine Louise Meurent (1844-1927) was a French painter and a famous model for painters. Although she is now best known as the favorite model of Édouard Manet, she also was an artist in her own right, who exhibited repeatedly at the prestigious "Paris Salon". In 1876 her paintings were selected for inclusion at the juried exhibition, when Manet's work was not.

Biography

Born into a family of artisans (Victorine's father was a patinator of bronzes, while her mother was a milliner), Meurent started modeling at the age of sixteen in the studio of Thomas Couture. She first worked for Manet in 1862, posing for a painting entitled, "The Street Singer". Manet was first drawn to Victorine when he saw her in the street, carrying her guitar. Victorine was particularly noticeable for her petite stature and her red hair, which is depicted as very bright in Manet's watercolour copy of "Olympia". As well as playing the guitar, Victorine also played the violin, gave lessons in the two instruments, and sang in cafe'-concerts. Her name remains forever associated with Manet's masterpieces, "The Luncheon on the Grass" and "Olympia", which include portraits of her. During this time period she also modelled for Belgian painter Alfred Stevens and Degas, both close friends of Manet. Her relationship with Stevens is said to have been particularly close.

Manet continued to use Victorine Meurent as a model until the early 1870s, when she began taking art classes and they became estranged, as Victorine was drawn to the more academic style of painting against which Manet's work was in opposition . The last painting by Manet in which Meurent appears is, "Gare Saint-Lazare", which is often referred to as, "The Railway", painted in 1873. The painting is considered the best example of Manet's first use of the modern approach to subject matter.

, who was very taken to introducing her as "Olympia".

Meurent was inducted into the Societie des Artistes Francaise in 1903, with the support of Charles Hermann-Leon and Tony Robert-Fleury, the Societie's founder. By 1906, Meurent had left Paris for the suburb of Colombes, where she lived with a woman named Marie Dufour for the remainder of her life. The two appear to have shared ownership of their house. Meurent died on March 17th, 1927. After the death of Dufour, in 1930, the contents of the house were liquidated; in the late 20th C., elderly neighbours recalled the last contents of the house, including a violin and its case, being burnt on a bonfire.

A painting by Meurent was recovered in 2004 and now hangs in the Colombes History Museum.

Meurent in fiction

The Irish writer George Moore included Meurent as a character in his semi-fictional autobiography, "Memoirs of My Dead Life". She appears as a middle-aged woman past her prime, living in a lesbian relationship with a famous courtesan.More recently, Victorine Meurent's life has inspired a historical novel, "Mademoiselle Victorine" by Debra Finerman. She also appears as a character in a film called "Manet in Love". Both works involve Meurent as Manet's mistress.

Meurent in Manet's works

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
1862
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1862
Musée d'Orsay, 1862-1863

Musée d'Orsay
1863
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1866

Further reading

*"Alias Olympia" by Eunice Lipton ISBN 0-8014-8609-2"A Biography of Victorine-Louise Meurent and Her Role in the Art of Edouard Manet." (Volumes I and II) by Seibert, Margaret Mary Armbrust ProQuest UMI #8625285.

External links

* [http://www.glbtq.com/arts/meurent_v.html GLBTQ Encyclopedia: Victorine Meurent]
* [http://blogs.princeton.edu/wri152-3/f05/nlagerfe A Fine Body of Work: Female Sexuality in Manet's Paintings of Victorine Meurent]