Victorine Meurent

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Portrait of Victorine Meurent

Édouard Manet, 1862

oil on canvas

42.9 × 43.8 cm

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Victorine Louise Meurent (1844-1927) was a French model and painter.

Although she is best known as the favourite model of Édouard Manet, she was also an artist in her own right, who exhibited several times at the prestigious Paris Salon.

Daughter of a family of artisans, she started modelling at the age of sixteen. She first worked for Manet in 1862, posing for a painting titled The Street Singer [1]. Her name remains forever associated with Manet's masterworks The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia. Manet continued to use her until the early 1870s, when she took up art classes herself and they became estranged. The last of his paintings in which she appears is Gare Saint-Lazare (The Railway, 1873) [2].

She first presented work of her own at the 1876 Salon — ironically, Manet's own submissions were rejected by the jury that year. Her 1879 entry, Bourgeoise de Nuremberg au XVIe siècle, was in the same room as Manet's. Work by Meurent was also included in the 1885 and 1904 editions. Today, most of her paintings and drawings seem to have been lost.

She is said to have died in poverty.