Spotted by Manet in the street, this woman became the face of a radical new aesthetic. Kathryn Hughes tells the story of Victorine Meurent, the red-headed muse.
Manet's forgotten muse: Kathryn Hughes tells the story of Victorine Meurent, the red-headed muse
Edouard Manet’s 1862 painting Street Singer announced a new kind of art. In contrast to the old, academic way of doing things – stately renderings of scenes from history, the Bible or mythology – the young Frenchman painted life as it surged through the streets of Montmartre and the Marais in Paris. Instead of heroes and saints, goddesses and madonnas, Manet’s pictures bustle with artisans, prostitutes and street entertainers, many of them his friends. ‘You must be of your time and paint what you see,’ he declared, hoping to match the intensely naturalistic approach of his literary friends Zola and Baudelaire.
No one embodied this new aesthetic better than Victorine Meurent, aka the ‘Street Singer’. Manet was to paint her nine times in total, producing two pictures in particular that would shake up the art world forever. The story goes that Manet spotted the 18-year-old musician hurrying through the streets and decided she would be the ideal subject to illustrate his new way of seeing the world.
Victorine was as different from the reigning beauties of the Second French Empire as it is possible to imagine. Where the women who typically appeared in portraits were elegant, poised and upper class, Victorine was short and slightly squat, with the kind of flyaway ginger hair that refuses to behave even when crammed under a hat. In Street Singer she is dressed in serviceable brown, her scuffed hem hinting that she cannot afford to replace her clothes as often as she might like. And the fact that she is eating fruit in public sends a message that here is a woman who is neither particularly refined nor especially moral.
Little is known about the life of Victorine Meurent. But that hasn’t stopped people making things up. For years rumours flew that she was a prostitute who died young, soaked in alcohol. In the late 20th century, scholars discovered she had, in fact, lived until she was 83, spending much of her life productively as a painter in her own right. Even so, the details are sketchy. The woman who helped inspire some of the most iconic images of the 19th century still remains an elusive figure.
What we do know is that Victorine was born in 1844 into a family of engravers and always harboured an interest in painting. To earn a living, she began modelling for Manet’s friend and mentor Thomas Couture at 16. She also worked as a musical performer in the barely respectable cafés catering to the intellectuals and artists of demi-mondaine Paris. At the age of 18 the girl known as ‘La Crevette’ (‘The Shrimp’) for her pink skin and red hair became Manet’s go-to model and muse.
The painting reveals a certain kindness, too. Manet lingers on her cleft chin, square jaw and eyes the colour of cognac. Her red hair, only half contained by a limp bow, frizzes out from her temples while her lashes are so blonde they almost disappear. She may not be a conventional beauty, but you find yourself drawn back to that solemn, peaky face again and again.
A naked Victorine in Le Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe (c1863-68) caused huge controversey
It was, though, Manet’s next painting that projected Victorine into the middle of a public scandal. Le Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe (1863) famously shows three people lounging on the grass following what looks like an excellent picnic of fruit and oysters. In many ways it is a typical tableau – except for the fact that although the young men are fully clothed, their female companion is completely naked.
Particularly shocking was that the woman showed no shame at her compromising position. In historical painting, nymphs and goddesses tended to shrink from the viewer and reach for a wrap. This young woman, by contrast, makes no attempt to cover up. Bored by her companions’ boozy postprandial chat, she allows her mind and gaze to wander. Until, that is, she catches sight of the viewer and stares back, turning him (or her) into a Peeping Tom.
It would be hard to overstate the outrage that Le Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe provoked among the thousands who poured into the Salon des Refusés – the painting having been rejected by the Salon (the official exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts). Respectable men hurried their wives past Victorine’s flanks before returning for a closer look. The Emperor thundered that it was disgusting.
He painted the background to look like a theatrical flat – the light is clearly artificial – and the figures are completely out of scale. Within a few years, Manet would be hailed as the father of Impressionism. But at this stage, as far as the art establishment was concerned, he was simply a young painter who took childish pleasure in breaking the rules.
IIt wasn't just Victorine's nudity in Olympia (1863) that shocked, but her complete lack of embarrassment. PHOTO: Musée municipal d’Art et d’Histoire de Colombes (France)
Perhaps inevitably, given Manet’s decision to paint Victorine in the nude, rumours swirled around the pair. Right from the start of their association, there were suggestions that she was his grisette or part-time lover. Modern scholars, however, point to the fact that while Manet died at 51 of syphilis, Victorine lived many decades more. This alone suggests that their relationship may have remained purely professional.
However, Manet’s next painting of Victorine did little to quell the speculation. If Le Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe hinted at sexual activity, Olympia (1863) left nothing to the imagination. In it, she appears as a courtesan lying on a rumpled post-coital bed. Leaning towards her is a black maidservant carrying a bouquet that has just arrived from a smitten admirer. But Olympia’s blank gaze, turned pointedly away from the proffered flowers, makes it clear that such puppyish adoration is all in a day’s work. It is thought that this was the first time a female nude had been shown in a major work of art not as a mythological or generic figure but as an individual woman, grappling with the practical realities of her time and place.
Victorine was to feature in several more paintings by Manet. In The Railway (1873), she confronts the viewer with her bold, appraising stare. The new station of Gare St-Lazare, represented here by a cloud of steam, is behind her and in this painting she is accompanied by a little girl. Is Victorine the child’s mother or her nursemaid? And why does she appear so uninterested in her young companion? As so often with Manet’s paintings, there is a narrative puzzle at the heart of the work, a sense that Victorine will never quite yield up her whole story.
Fixing the viewer with her gaze in The Railway (1873) PHOTO: The National Gallery of Art, Washington
Ironically, Manet’s puzzling, game-playing art was not the sort that appealed to Victorine herself. By now she was attending painting classes at the Académie Julian, taking the first steps into a more conventional kind of picture-making. She was good at it, too. Her one surviving picture,Palm Sunday, shows a pretty young girl holding a piece of palm to mark a day in the Christian calendar. It is the sort of assured, respectful art that a well-to-do businessman might hang on his walls.
A self-portrait of Victorine was shown at the Salon in 1876, a year in which Manet failed to get any of his work accepted. She made the show again in 1879, a remarkable achievement given the competition; and this time her work was hung in the same room as Manet’s, an irony that he cannot have failed to notice.
Victorine exhibited at the Salon again in 1885 and 1904, and in 1903 she was elected a member of the prestigious Sociétés des Artistes Français.Palm Sunday survives in a small suburban gallery while Manet’s work, by contrast, swaggers on the walls of some of the most prestigious galleries around the world.
Palm Sunday (1885) is the only surviving painting by Victorine Meurent PHOTO: Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library
Manet and Victorine appear to have lost touch in the 1870s, perhaps driven apart by their professional rivalry. It would be nice to report that Victorine went on to make a comfortable living out of her art, but the odds were stacked against her, as they were for most working-class women of that period. Instead, she seems to have drifted back into performing and giving music lessons as a way of making ends meet.
Even then she could barely scrape together a living. In 1883, three months after Manet’s early death at the age of 51, Victorine plucked up courage and wrote to the artist’s widow, Suzanne. ‘Madame, you know without doubt that I posed for a great many of [your husband’s] paintings, notably for Olympia,’ she started politely, going on to describe how Manet had promised her a share of the profits.
Victorine had refused this generous offer, although she had been careful to tell the artist that ‘when I could no longer pose I would remind him of his promise’. Now, explained the 40-year-old Victorine to Madame Manet, she was calling in that favour. She was too old to pose, her health was poor and she had to look after her elderly mother; all in all, ‘a desperate situation’. She concludes her letter by asking for Madame Manet’s help. No answer ever arrived.
‘Manet: Portraying Life’ is at the Royal Academy, London W1, from 26 January (royalacademy.org.uk) until 14 April
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