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Woman with a Fan (Jeanne Duval)
Edouard Manet French
Not on view
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.
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