In this painting, Manet seems to return to his earlier manner. The
woman is painted against a midnight-blue background, and her
studied, somewhat affected pose is slightly reminiscent of certain
full-length portraits by Whistler. The textures, the fruit that
has dropped from the perch, the reddish hair, even the woman's
face, have that French savor and substance of which Gustave Courbet was
then the master. This is a curious work, not without charm, from
the monocle to the Parma violets. Manet seems to have wished to
convey something by it. Victorine Meurend, who posed for it, is
wearing the same blue ribbon as in her 1862 portrait.
Singled out by Theophile Thore (who had seen the
painting in the wooden hut on the Place de l'Alma, under the title
Young Woman of 1866), this work was attacked by Theophile Gautier,
who, with his typical love of Renaissance ornamentation, wrote in
Le Moniteur of May 11, "This young woman, they say, is painted
from a delicate-featured, pretty, and intelligent model, with one
of the finest heads of Titian
hair that a colorist could wish for. M. Manet's painting of the
head must certainly be deliberately unflattering. The features are
coarse and ill-drawn, and their unhealthy color bears no relation
to the fresh complexion of a young, fair-skinned woman. The dress,
of a dubious pink, gives no idea of the body underneath it."
What a faulty judgment! The critics speak of everything,
the woman who posed for the picture, her complexion, who she was;
of everything, in fact, except the painting itself, the peculiar
charm of the style, and the rare modulations and sheen of the
colors.
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