Detail of Woman with a Fan by Manet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 2023

Title: Woman with a Fan (Jeanne Duval)

Artist: Edouard Manet (French, Paris 1832–1883 Paris)

Date: 1862

Geography: Country of Origin France

Culture: French

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 35 1/4 × 44 1/2 in. (89.5 × 113 cm)
Framed: 48 13/16 × 57 1/2 × 6 5/16 in., 92.6 lb. (124 × 146 × 16 cm, 42 kg)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Szépművészeti Múzeum / Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest (368.B)

Jeanne Duval was a young actress and the longtime mistress and companion of Manet’s friend the poet Charles Baudelaire. Reclining on a sofa and staring directly at the viewer, she wears a voluminous white day dress that dominates the canvas. While Duval’s pose and attire befit the presentation of a socially respectable bourgeois woman, Manet gave his sitter a light brown skin tone that conveys her biracial heritage, as well as bright coral earrings, a long-established ethnic marker of Black femininity, also worn by the maid in Olympia. In this way, Manet signifies Duval’s liminal status in nineteenth-century Parisian society.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/844638