Beginnings

Édouard Manet

Olympia

1863

Oil on canvas, 130.5 × 191 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris

A reclining nude on a white bed, with a Black maid bringing flowers. Manet recast Titian's Venus of Urbino as a Paris prostitute, and the picture caused a scandal.

• Manet lights the pale body flatly and sets it hard against the dark background. This flat, bright light, with little gradual shading, anticipated the Impressionists' lighter, less modeled painting.
• Painted in 1863 but first shown at the 1865 Salon, where critics attacked it fiercely.
• Émile Zola led the small group that defended it.
• She meets the viewer's eye. Look for the black ribbon at her neck.
• Monet raised a public subscription in 1890 to give it to the French state.

Salon nudes were usually goddesses or harem women in an imagined East. Olympia was a woman a Parisian man might pay to visit.

Odalisque

A harem woman, a common type for 19th-century nudes.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain