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This is the first painting by Victorine Meurent to enter a museum collection outside of France. She is better known as an artist’s model and was Edouard Manet’s favorite for over a decade prior to making her debut as a painter at the Paris Salon in 1876. Meurent exhibited a self-portrait, perhaps this one, whereas Manet’s work was rejected by the Salon’s jury that year. The sidelong gaze of self-assessment in a mirror and mature features of a woman in her early thirties enrich our knowledge of this artist whose face is so familiar from Manet’s paintings from the 1860s, now in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the MFA.
Self-Portrait
Victorine Meurent (French, 1844 – 1927)
French
about 1876
Medium/Technique
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
35 × 27 cm (13 3/4 × 10 5/8 in.)
Credit Line
Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund
Accession Number2021.554
NOT ON VIEW
ClassificationsPaintings
This is the first painting by Victorine Meurent to enter a museum collection outside of France. She is better known as an artist’s model and was Edouard Manet’s favorite for over a decade prior to making her debut as a painter at the Paris Salon in 1876. Meurent exhibited a self-portrait, perhaps this one, whereas Manet’s work was rejected by the Salon’s jury that year. The sidelong gaze of self-assessment in a mirror and mature features of a woman in her early thirties enrich our knowledge of this artist whose face is so familiar from Manet’s paintings from the 1860s, now in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the MFA.
Inscriptionsupper left: V. Meurent
Provenance1876, exhibited by the artist at the Paris Salon. June 2010, purchased at the Vanves Flea Market, Paris, by Édouard Ambroselli (dealer), Paris; 2021, sold by Édouard Ambroselli to the MFA. (Accession Date: September 30, 2021)