Guest post by Victoria

This was another guest post related to the history of art modelling, which I am now re-posting. Penned by Victoria Sears Goldman, whom I thank profusely. 

In their novel Manette Salomon (1867), Edmund and Jules Goncourt characterize the art model as the natural mistress of the artist.  Indeed, century courtesans did often model for painters during the nineteenth century.

Many have speculated as to whether Victorine Meurent, Edouard Manet’s preferred model during the 1860s, was a prostitute.  Beyond this speculation, there has been a persistent and inexplicable desire by Manet historians to assign to Victorine the role of prostitute.  So great has been the discussion of Victorine’s morality or lack thereof both during the 1860s and by art historians since that Victorine herself came to function as part of the content of Manet’s paintings; the morality of the real Victorine has become part of the subject matter of the most famous paintings in which she appears, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia, both dating to 1863 and currently in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.   

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe Commons. wikimedia.org

But who was Victorine in reality, and why was her identity so tied up with that of the women she embodies in Manet’s paintings?  She is assumed to have been a prostitute, to have lived a life of debauchery.  Are these descriptions accurate?

Victorine-Louise Meurent was born in Paris in 1844 to an artisan family.  Her name first appears in the artist Thomas Couture’s payment accounts for his models in 1861.  Manet may have met Victorine through Couture, but this cannot be determined with certainty, as it has also been claimed that Manet simply spotted Victorine on the street, carrying her guitar. At the age of eighteen Victorine first modeled for Manet for The Street Singer, and she would go on to pose for nine of his canvases. Victorine continued to model for Manet until the early 1870s, when she began taking art classes at the Académie Julian and parted ways with the artist.   In 1876 her paintings were selected for the Paris Salon—the very Salon which, ironically, rejected Manet’s work that year.  She would also exhibit works at the Salons of 1879, 1885, and 1904, and in 1903 she was elected a member of the Société des Artistes Français.  Nevertheless, she struggled for recognition and died, poor and forgotten, in 1928.

Today only one of Victorine’s paintings is known to have survived – Le Jour des Rameaux (Palm Sunday), which was recovered in 2004 and is now owned by the Musée Municipal d'Art et d'Histoire de Colombes.   The locations of Victorine’s other paintings are unknown.  

It is difficult to know whether Manet chose Victorine to model for him because she was already a known personality, or whether it was through his paintings that she became one.   Either way she was well-known in the Latin Quarter.  Some claim she was a minor celebrity, perhaps attending the bals of the Parisian demi-monde: gatherings at which different classes mixed, featuring dancers and actresses, where the attendees could act as either voyeurs or participants.  There are multiple of accounts of Louises and Victorines who frequented the bals.

Prostitutes were, of course, a ubiquitous presence in the demi-monde, and in Paris during the Second Empire, there were many types of prostitutes, from the brothel and street prostitute to the courtesan.  But was Victorine herself a prostitute? The name “Victorine” is not unlike those adopted by prostitutes.  However, there seems to be little evidence to support the claim that Victorine in fact deserved that label.  In her book Alias Olympia, Eunice Lipton found no evidence for Victorine as a prostitute, and while documentation of her life after posing for Manet’s The Railway in 1872-73 is scarce, a letter written by Victorine to Manet’s widow in 1883 hardly suggests she was reduced to prostitution.  Nevertheless, questions about Victorine’s virtue persisted during and beyond the 1860s.  Studio and café gossip in the 1880s implied she was an alcoholic.  Yet she was also a music teacher and competent enough as a painter to have works accepted by the Salon on multiple occasions.

Not only were Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia the most famous images of Victorine; they were also the only paintings in which she would appear nude.  Both paintings quote Venetian works—Giorgione/Titian’s Fête champêtre (Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe) and Titian’s Venus of Urbino (Olympia)—and share the nude as their subject matter.

Early sixteenth-century Venetian painters created the European tradition of the female nude.  In particular, the sleeping Venus seems to have been an invention of the Venetian Renaissance.  However, it is important to note that traditionally, Venus is not a seductress but rather the personification of a natural force.  Her normal habitat in painting is landscape; once a nude appears in any other context, it ceases to be a symbol of a natural force and becomes a living person in an actual place at a known time.  This is in part why Olympia caused such a stir.  She was explicitly connected to a particular time and place: contemporary Paris.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, female nudes were appreciated so long as they were in the guise of goddesses or mythological figures.  Nude mythological figures were acceptable because they were removed in time and represented an ideal of beauty—an ideal quite separate from the unidealized contemporary prostitute.  The novelty of Manet’s modernism lay in its use of imagery not previously associated with high art.

Olympia Commons.wikimedia. org

Images of the female nude, from Titian’s Venus of Urbino to Cabanel’s Birth of Venus, had always made a “still life” of the human body—a luxury commodity, an object of appetite and imaginary consumption, rather than a sign for subjectivity.   Furthermore, desire was no part of the nude: the nude is human form in general, abstracted from life.  But Olympia travestied the traditional nude.  She was not abstracted from life; she was life.   Indeed, the public saw something other than a traditional Venus figure in Olympia.  They saw a woman who was “unwashed,” and who, by virtue of her dirtiness and nakedness, was indicative of class.  Olympia’s naked presence represented a shocking symbol of the profane prostitute, not of a mythological deity.  T.J. Clark argues that Olympia was problematic because it “altered and played with identities the culture wished to keep still, pre-eminently those of the nude and the prostitute, and that that was largely why it proved so unpopular.”

Camille Lemonnier wrote in 1870 that “in order to stay virginal the nude in art must be impersonal and must not particularize.”  By situating Olympia in contemporary Paris and casting Victorine—a known figure—in the role, Olympia particularized.    Clark writes that “the achievement of Olympia is that it gives its female subject a particular sexuality as opposed to a general one.”

Victorine’s nudity in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe caused a scandal as well.  Scenes of picnicking were by no means foreign to the Salon; it was that the contrast of Victorine to her dressed male companions prevented the viewer from romanticizing the painting into a vision of an innocent Arcadian past.  Manet chose to portray Victorine nude in Déjeuner in order to remove the academic nude from its traditional trappings and insert it into the reality of contemporary society.

It was the combination of the nudity (or perhaps “nakedness” is a better term), contemporary setting, and recognizability of Victorine that caused the scandal caused by Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.  In this way, the model itself became part of the content of the paintings and contributed directly to their controversial nature. Manet’s nude was ugly and real; it had neither the pastoral quality nor the anonymity of a traditional painted nude.  It was not a luxurious commodity available for consumption by the viewer, but rather a woman known to that viewer.  It was Victorine.   

References:

Andersen, Wayne, Manet: The Picnic and the Prostitute (Boston: Editions Fabriart, 2005).

Armstrong, Carol, Manet, Manette (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

Clark, T.J., The Painting of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

Farwell, Beatrice, Manet and the Nude (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981).

Main, V.R., “The Naked Truth,” The Guardian, Oct. 2, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/03/women.manet

Seibert, Margaret, A Biography of Victorine-Louise Meurent and her role in the Art of Edouard Manet (Diss., Ohio State University, 1986).

Sidlauskas, Susan, “The Spectacle of the Face: Manet’s Portrait of Victorine Meurent,” Perspectives on Manet, ed. Therese Dolan, pp. 29-48.