What do we know about Laure, this sparsely documented woman of color who posed for one of the most reviled artists in his day? In her 1999 book Differencing the Canon, art historian Griselda Pollock claims that she found a birth certificate for a woman named “Laure” dated April 19, 1839. Thanks to their work, I can write about Laure’s career in art and speculate a bit beyond their illuminating endeavors. Murrell presented a paper on Laure during the 2017 College Art Association conference in New York City, which I had the good fortune to attend. Fortunately, within the last few years, three substantial studies dedicated to Laure have pieced together her life and times: Emma Jacob, in her unpublished senior thesis for Vassar College, and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby in Art Bulletin (December 2015). Her presence, along with the featured prostitute, projects the scope of modernity in Paris that accompanied Baron Haussmann’s renovations in the 1860s. Let us now shine our light on Laure (sometimes referred to as Laura), the other model in Manet’s infamous painting of brothel life in 19th-century Paris. Today, scores of pages lavish attention on this brazen red-head while ignoring her companion, the black maid who holds the copious bouquet of flowers that brighten up this severe composition. The best-known examples are Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia (both completed in 1863), currently on view in the Musée d’Orsay. She dared to stare with a touch of arrogance from a body unfettered by clothing (society’s armor). Victorine’s face and body captured the modern white woman’s claim to power through sexual congress: not only the physical but also the mental. ![]() I followed up with a review of Eunice Lipton’s book Alias Olympia, which weaves together an imagined journal written by Victorine and the New York art historian Lipton’s adventures as she tracked down proof of the model’s existence. A few months ago, Hazel Smith wrote a superb article about Victorine Meurent, the favorite model of Édouard Manet during the 1860s.
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