Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Olympia
Edouard Manet French
Not on view
Presented at the Salon of 1865, Olympia generated outrage among critics and the public for its frank representation of a contemporary courtesan painted on a grand scale and in a manner some perceived as flat, coarse, or dirty. Manet adapted the composition from Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538)—a painting he had copied at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence—and subverted traditional academic approaches to the nude, including conventions of idealized beauty and guises of mythology. Olympia gazes at the viewer with unabashed directness, while her maid brings flowers, perhaps from a client. For his models he cast Victorine Meurent, who had previously posed nude for Déjeuner sur l’herbe, as Olympia; and Laure, who appears in two other paintings by Manet, as the maid. Laure’s presence alludes to the burgeoning free Black community in Paris at this time.
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