The painting above, Le Jour des Rameaux or Palm Sunday, is unique in as much as it is the only surviving painting by my featured artist. It was recovered in and can now be found hanging in the local museum of Colombes, a suburb of Paris. Victorine Meurent was born into a working class family in Paris in It is thought that her father worked as an engraver, a patinator of bronze, and her mother worked as a milliner.
It is also thought that she must have shown an interest in art as it is believed that in , at the age of sixteen, she worked as a model at the Senlis studio of the French history painter, Thomas Couture, and it was here she probably received her first artistic tuition.
Whatever the circumstances of that first encounter, there was an immediate rapport between these two very different characters. So what could the two offer each other? I suppose it is obvious. For her, Manet could provide her with employment as his model and at the same time offer her some drawing tuition. For him, being a painter, he was always on the lookout for a good looking young female model and Victorine with her eye-catching long unruly red hair was just what he liked. She was small, slightly dumpy in stature, which often led her to be given the nickname, la Crevette , the shrimp.
She was not what one would describe as an elegant beauty but she appealed to Manet. The first time Manet used Victorine as a model was for a painting in The woman we see depicted is modelled by Victorine. She is dressed in a drab brown gown alluding to the fact that she was poor and did not have the money to buy a new one. Although she has no time to loiter, she quickly glances towards us and, at the same time, crams cherries into her mouth.
She is too busy to stop and soon will disappear amongst the bustling Parisian crowd. This painting by Manet was in some ways a new kind of art. It was not the academic art which depicted women in scenes from the bible or from mythological stories.
