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Abstract
The black woman in Manet's Olympia (1863) has often been overlooked. So, too, has the model Laure who posed for this painting and others. Manet's painting makes visible France's long reliance on slavery in the Caribbean, but also its Revolutionary redefinition of all blacks as paid workers after the second abolition of slavery in 1848. How does thinking about the entry of blacks, specifically black women, into France's economy of wage labor differently illuminate Manet's painting?
Notes
1. See Manet's undated letter to his mother, in Édouard Manet, Lettres de la jeunesse: 1848–1849 voyage à Rio (Paris: Louis Rouart, 1928), 53–57
, at 51–53. This undated letter follows another to his mother dated February 5, 1849, ibid., 49–50. In this undated letter, Manet writes (55): “On n'a pas pu trouver de maître de dessin à Rio, le Commandant m'a prié de donner des leçons à mes camarades, me voici donc érigé en maître de dessin; il faut te dire que pendant la traverse je m’étais fait une réputation, que tous les officiers et les professeurs m'ont demandé leur caricature et que le Commandant même m'a demandé la sienne pour ses étrennes; j'ai eu le bonheur de m'acquitter du tout de manière à contenter tout le monde.”2. Ibid., 51–53: “pour l'Européen quelque peu artiste elle [Rio] offert un cachet tout particulier; on ne rencontre dans la rue que des nègres et des négresses; les Brésiliens sortent peu et les Brésiliennes encore moins; on ne les voit que lorsqu'elles vont à la messe ou le soir après le diner; elles se mettent à leurs fenêtres et qu'elles s'aperçoivent qu'on les regarde elles se retirent aussitôt. Dans ce pays tous les nègres sont esclaves; tous ces malhereux ont l'air abruti; le pouvoir qu'ont sur eux les blancs est extraordinaire; j'ai vu un marché d'esclaves, c'est un spectacle assez révoltant pour nous. … Les négresses sont pour la plupart nues jusqu’à la ceinture, quelques-unes ont un foulard attaché au cou et tombant sur la poitrine, elles sont généralement laides, cependant j'en ai vu d'assez jolies; elles se mettent avec beaucoup de recherche. Les unes se font des turbans, les autres arrangent très artistement leurs cheveux crêpus et elles portent presque toutes des jupons ornés de monstrueux volants.”
3. Manet to his cousin Jules Dejouy, Monday, February 26, 1849, in ibid., 57–60, at 58: “la population est au trois quarts nègre, ou mulâtre, cette partie est généralement affreuse sauf quelques exceptions parmi les négresses et les mulâtresses; ces dernières sont presque toutes jolies.”
4. Ibid.: “At Rio all negroes are slaves. The trade is in great force. As for the Brazilian men, they are soft and have, I believe, little energy; the Brazilian women are generally very well but they do not merit their reputation for lightness that they are accorded in France; nothing is as prudish and as stupid as a Brazilian woman, they never appear in the street during the day; only at five in the evenings do they place themselves at their windows, then it is permitted to ogle them at leisure [A Rio tous les nègres sont esclaves. La traite y est en grande vigueur. Quant aux Brésiliens, ils sont mous et ont, je crois, peu d’énergie, les Brésiliennes sont généralement très bien mais ne méritent pas la reputation de légèreté qu'on veut bien leur prêter en France; rien n'est si prude et si bête qu'une Brésilienne, elles ne paraissent jamais de jour dans la rue; le soir seulement à 5 heures ells se mettent toutes à leurs fenêtres, il est permis alors de les lorgner à loisir].” On Manet as dandy, see Carol Armstrong, Manet Manette (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
5. See Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France 1802–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
6. See Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
7. Louis Chevalier, Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 360
. Chevalier quotes numerous remarks in Eugène Buret, De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France (Paris: Paulin, 1840). See also M. A. Frégier, Des classes dangereuses de la population dans grands villes, et des moyens de les rendre meilleures, 2 vols. (Paris: chez J.-B. Ballière, 1840), 141, 364 .8. Petition of Workers of Paris, in favor of the abolition of slavery, January 22, 1844, quoted in full in Patricia Motylewski, ed., La Société Française pour l'abolition de l'esclavage, 1834–1850 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998), 157–58
: “L'esclavage dégrade autant le possesseur que le possédé. C'est pour obéir au grande principe de la Fraternité humaine, que nous venons vous faire entendre notre voix en faveur de nos malheureux frères esclaves. Nous éprouvons aussi le besoin de protester hautement, au nom de la classe ouvrière, contre les souteneurs de l'esclavage, qui osent prétendre, eux qui agissent en connaissance de cause, que le sort des ouvriers français est plus déplorable que celui des esclaves. … Quels soient les vices de l'organisation sociale actuelle du travail en France, l'ouvrier est libre. … L'ouvrier s'appartient; nul n'a le droit de le fouetter, de le vendre, de le séparer violemment de sa femme, de ses enfants, de ses amis.”9. See Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Cursed Mimicry: France and Haiti, Again (1848–1851),” Art History 38, no. 1 (February 2015): 68–105
.10. The term stems from Orlando Patterson's classic study Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
11. T. J. Clark, preface to The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), xxvii.
12. Ibid., xxvii–xxviii. Clark continues, “‘Nakedness’ was a word … for a form of embodiment that somehow puts the free circulation of images (such as Woman, desire and money) in doubt. … The problem is that ‘class,’ too, was one of the images on which modernity thrived. Class was one of its favorite games, but the game obeyed essentially the same rules as the other terms of spectacle—rules of mobility, elusiveness, disembodiment, pure visibility and confinement to the world of signs. [But in Olympia] class appeared in the form of nakedness.”
13. Kymberly N. Pinder, Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History (New York: Routledge, 2002).
14. Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 204–42
.15. Oft quoted is Gilman's assertion (ibid., 216) that “Sarah Baartmann's sexual parts, her genitalia and her buttocks, serve as the central image for the black female throughout the nineteenth century.”
16. Ibid., 232. “Black females do not merely represent the sexualized female, they also represent the female as the source of corruption and disease.” (ibid., 231).
17. Z. S. Strother, “Display of the Body Hottentot,” in Africans on Stage, ed. Berth Lindfors (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999), 1–61
, at 2, 40.18. Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the Venus Hottentot,” Gender and Society 15, no. 6 (December 2001): 816–34
, at 822. Magubane (823) points out the basic fact that “Blackness is less a stable, observable empirical fact than an ideology that is historically determined and, thus, variable.” It is notable that contemporary scholars often discern fewer distinctions among persons from Africa and the African diaspora than people over a century ago, lumping persons into categories of black and white because of the long-standing binary opposition in United States history.19. Lorraine O'Grady, “Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” Afterimage 2 (1992): 1–23
, at 16: “Whether the theory is Christianity or modernism, each of which scripts the body as all-nature, our bodies will be the most natural.” Griselda Pollock, “A Tale of Three Women: Seeing in the Dark, Seeing Double, at Least, with Manet,” in Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), 246–315 , esp. 255, 277–305. See also Jennifer DeVere Brody, “Black Cat Fever: Manifestations of Manet's Olympia,” Theatre Journal 53, no. 1 (March 2001): 95–118 . For another Orientalist reading of Olympia, see Nancy Locke, Manet and the Family Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). On the related issue of Manet's painting of Charles Baudelaire's mixed-race lover, Jeanne Duval, see also Therese Dolan, “Manet's Portrait of Baudelaire's Mistress, Reclining,” Art Bulletin 79, no. 4 (December 1997): 611–29; and Myriam J. A. Chancy, Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 41–42 . On the problematic of the “negress,” see Huey Copeland, “In the Wake of the Negress,” in Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, ed. Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 480–97.20. Pollock, “A Tale of Three Women,” 285.
21. Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter?” 829 (my emphasis).
22. Paul Jamot and Georges Wildenstein, Manet, L'art français, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Beaux-Arts, Édition d'Études et de Documents, 1932), vol. 1, 81;
and Achille Tabarant, Manet et ses oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 79.23. Pollock, “A Tale of Three Women,” 286. Pollock has also located a birth certificate for a woman named Laure who was born April 19, 1839, in Paris. This Laure is listed without a surname and her race is not mentioned (ibid., 308 n. 19).
24. According to Émile Zola in L'Événement Illustré, May 10, 1868, quoted in Juliet Wilson Bareau, Manet by Himself, Correspondence & Conversation, Paintings, Pastels, Prints & Drawings (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 49.
25. For identification of this picture as “Laure” rather than “A Negress,” see Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art from the American Revolution to World War I: Black Models and White Myths, vol. 1, pt. 2, 2nd ed. (1989; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 206–7,
325. For the scant evidence about Laure's life, see Pollock, “A Tale of Three Women,” 255, 277–305, 308; and Marie Lathers, “Laure,” in Dictionary of Artists Models, ed. Jill Berk Jiminez (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), 315–16 . The recent Royal Academy of Arts exhibition catalog Manet: Portraying Life lists the painting as “The Negress” (London: Royal Academy of Arts; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2012), 138 n. 25, 156, 276. Pollock and her research assistant, Nancy Proctor, located a rental agreement for a Laure at this address residing on the fourth floor; they also found a birth certificate for a Laure born April 19, 1839; in 1863 this Laure would have been twenty-four years old; Pollock, “A Tale of Three Women,” 255, 308 n. 19.26. Nicolas Auguste Gallimard, Examen du Salon de 1849 (Paris, 1849), 78, quoted in Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art from the American Revolution to World War I, vol. 1, pt. 2, Slaves and Liberators (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 172
.27. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life;
Michael Fried, Manet's Modernism, or the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Armstrong, Manet Manette.28. Charles Expilly, Les femmes et les moeurs du Brésil (Paris: Charlieu et Huillery, 1863).
29. M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l'isle Saint-Domingue, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: chez l'auteur, 1797), vol. 1, 15, vol. 2, 72.
30. Auguste-Jean-Marie Vermorel, Ces dames, physiognomies parisiennes (Paris: Tous les Librairies, 1860), 28: “Il ne manque rien à Finette, rien, pas même un nègre! un nègre dont elle parle à tout propos! un nègre qui n'appartient qu'à elle et n'obéit qu'à elle. Elle l'aime tant, son nègre!” (Finette did not want for anything, nothing, not even a negro: a negro with whom she shared everything; a negro who belonged only to her and who obeyed only her. She loved her dearly, her negro!), quoted and trans. Phylis A. Floyd, “The Puzzle of Olympia,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture 3, no. 1 (Spring 2004), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring04/70-spring04/spring04article/285-the-puzzle-of-olympia.
31. Trans. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 283;
for the complete poem, see Julius Meier-Graefe, Edouard Manet (Munich: Piper, 1912), 134–36 .32. Geronte [Victor Fournel], “Les excentriques et les grotesques,” La Gazette de France, June 30, 1865, quoted in full in Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 289. This essay fully relies on Clark's extensive compilation and often complete citation in French of Olympia's reviews, as well as many of his translations. Here I have translated additional text.
33. Amédée Cantaloube, Le Grand Journal, May 21, 1865, 2, partly quoted in Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 287–88.
34. Ibid.
35. Pierrot, “Une première visite au Salon,” Les Tablettes de Pierrot—Histoire de la Semaine, May 14, 1865, quoted in full in Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 288.
36. See Mina Curtiss, “Manet Caricatures: Olympia,” in Massachusetts Review 7, no. 4 (1966): 725–52.
37. See, for example, Théophile Gautier's response to Alphonse de Lamartine's play Toussaint Louverture, which opened April 7, 1850, after the second abolition of slavery: “on ne voit sur la scène que nègres, mulâtres, quarterons, métis, griffes et autres variétés de bois d’ébène,” La Presse, April 8, 1850, reprinted in Gautier, Histoire de l'art dramatique (Paris: Magin, 1859), vol. 6, 163, and quoted in Léon-François Hoffmann's introduction to Alphonse de Lamartine, Toussaint Louverture, ed. Hoffmann (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), xxvi
.38. Cham, Le Salon de 1865 photographié (Paris: Arnauld de Vresse, 1865).
On Cham, see David Kunzle, “Cham, the Popular Caricaturist: Cham and Daumier—Two Careers, Two Reputations, Two Audiences,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 96 (December 1980): 213–24.39. Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
40. Geronte, “Les excentriques et les grotesques.”
41. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 111.
42. Although models were assumed to be sexually available, there is no evidence suggesting Manet's sexual relationship with either of his models. Of course, men past and present have indulged this erotic fantasy, all the more titillating when conceived as transgressive. One twentieth-century fabulist even claimed Manet died of venereal disease contracted in Brazil: despite his captain's warnings, young Édouard's “first experience of love, was embodied in the sable features of a Rio slave girl.” See Henri Perruchot, Manet, trans. Humphrey Hare (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1962), 41, 226.
There is no real evidence Manet contracted venereal disease, but if he did, he could as easily have done so in Paris. I thank Nancy Locke for references and conversation and Todd Olson for his lecture regarding the long identification of syphilis with the New World, “Recto/Verso: Poussin's Reversals,” in the session “Disappearing Acts: Invisibility and the Limits of Representation in Seventeenth-Century France,” chaired by Katherine Ibbett (Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Cambridge, 2005).43. Historian Robin Mitchell has located a Parisian brothel of “negresses” in a published guide at the end of the eighteenth century, Les bordels de Paris, avec les noms, demeures et prix, plan salubre et patriotique soumis aux illustres des états généraux pour en faire un article de la Constitution (Paris: MM. Dillon, Sartine, Lenoir, La Troliere, & Compagnie, 1790)
. See Mitchell, “Les Ombres Noires de Saint Domingue: The Impact of Black Women on Gender and Racial Boundaries in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2010) . Louis-Léopold Boilly also placed a black woman among the prostitutes at the Palais-Royal in 1804. See Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 278–79 ; and Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 47–58.44. In her essay “Nadar and the Art of Portrait Photography,” Françoise Heilbrun betrays the lengths to which French scholars can go to repress colonial history in order to celebrate an artist's achievement: “In the second of Nadar's images, the half-nude sitter offers us her opulent bosom. The beauty of her expression, her eyes lifted in a melancholy gaze that is admirably brought out by the lighting, makes us realize we are miles away from the modes of erotic and licentious photography”; in Nadar, by Maria Morris Hambourg et al., exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 50
. On this photograph see also Hambourg's entries for these portraits, nos. 61, 62, in ibid., 239.45. Jules de Goncourt and Edmond de Goncourt, consecutive notes for La fille Élisa, quoted in Robert Ricatte, La genèse de “La fille Élisa” (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), 67:
“Une marcheuse d'un bordel, pas du tout voix éraillée; voix de négresse créole fausse; des notes cristallines et cassées comme un harmonica qui se briserait … faire l'amie de la putain une négresse, étudier le type et le mettre en scène.”46. See, for example, A. Scheler, Dictionnaire d'étymologie française d'après les résultats de la science moderne (Brussels: A. Schnée, 1862)
, s.v. “Créole”: “d. l'esp. criollo (de criar, produire. L. creare). Le sens le plus large de ce mot est: individu de race étrangère, né dans le pays.” M. Bescherelle, Dictionnaire national: ou, Dictionnaire universel de la langue française (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1870) , s.v. “Créole”: “(en espag. criolo, de criar, élever, nourrir; ou de criado, élève domestique; on disait jadis criole, ou du caraïbe, creol). Nom qu'on donne à un Européen d'origine qui est né dans les colonies. Ce nom était autrefois appliqué aux nègres nés dans l'esclavage, des parents africains. Il s'est étendu même jusqu'aux animaux.”47. Though there is a scant literature on Jacques Eugène Feyen, he was known and respected among his contemporaries. A student of Paul Delaroche, he evolved into a competent painter of fishing scenes, and, like his brother, the sculptor Augustin Feyen-Perrin, Feyen worked extensively in the Breton coastal village of Cancale. He was awarded a medal at the Salon of 1866, second-class in 1880, and the Legion of Honor in 1881. His work was especially popular with upper-middle-class British and American collectors in the late nineteenth century and appeared frequently at auction. See John Denison Champlin, Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905), 54
; Étienne Charles, “Le doyen des artistes français: M. Eugène Feyen,” Le Mois Littéraire et Pittoresque 16 (July–December 1906): 158–66; and Lalance, “Eugène Feyen,” Bulletin des Sociétés Artistiques de l'Est 14, no. 10 (October 1908): 117–22. Feyen painted a related subject the following year in a little-known, more disturbing painting auctioned by Sotheby's London on May 7, 1986. Entitled A Group of Children with Their Coloured Servant, 1866, 30 by 20½ in., the work harkens back to eighteenth-century paintings of walks in the park. The painting portrays a fashionably dressed white girl and boy holding the hands of a lavishly attired toddler, attended by a black servant boy who is oversize, costumed in vaguely North African clothes, and caricaturally smiling.48. On the history of wet nursing, see George D. Sussman, “The Wet-Nursing Business in Nineteenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies 9, no. 2 (Autumn 1975): 304–28
; and idem, Selling Mother's Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France, 1715–1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Fanny Faÿ-Sallois, Les nourrices à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris: Payot, 1980); and Bernadette de Castelbajac, Nourrices et nounous: Une historie des femmes allaitantes (Paris: Cosmopole, 2007).49. “Salon de 1865,” L'Illustration, May 27, 1865, 333–34; and A. P. Martial, Lettre illustrée sur le Salon de 1865 à M.r Gustave Henry a [sic] Commercy (Paris: Cadart et Luquet, 1865), 17
.50. “Salon de 1865,” L'Illustration, 334: “M. Feyen y a trouvé le motif d'une gracieuse composition, un peu grande peut-être, mais arrangé et peinte avec soin. Deux bonnes, l'une blonde, Alsacienne à coiffe noir, l'autre, forte négresse aux dents blanches et aux yeux jaunes, sont assises sur un banc qui s'appuie à un treillage. La première tient une petite fille de huit mois environ, vêtue d'une blouse blanche, et la seconde un petit garçon d'un an et demi, aussi vigoureux que la petite est delicate. Les deux enfants s'embrassent bien, ou plutôt c'est la fillette qui, le nez en l'air, presse de sa main droite la joue du garcon et l'embrasse sur les lèvres. Le bambin étonné se laisse faire, son bras gauche, un peu musculeux, s'applique en longueur au bras de la négresse: il sent glisser des genoux de sa bonne. La petite, au contraire, est soutenue et n'aucun effort à faire.”
51. See Honoré de Balzac, “La fille aux yeux d'or” [Girl with the golden eyes], in Histoire des treize, pt. 3 (Paris: Bréchet, 1835),
which he dedicated to Eugène Delacroix. Delacroix's construction of his studio as a site of what I have called “heterosexual conquest” offers a foil to Manet's pictorial practice and silence regarding his personal relationship with his models. Delacroix's youthful journal entries explicitly note sexual acts and conflate them with pictorial mastery over his models; see Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France, 237–79.52. Sussman, Selling Mother's Milk, 117.
53. This has recently been claimed by Sheldon Cheek's online article of October 21, 2014, entitled “Laura, the Black Model Who Graced the Art of 19th-Century France,” Root, in conjunction with Image of the Black Archive & Library, Harvard University, http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2014/10/a_black_model_who_graced_the_art_of_19th_century_france.html.
54. See, for example, Chanteloub's Portrait de Marie-Jeanne Grellier en compagnie de sa nourrice, Musée d'Aquitaine, Bordeaux.
55. Cham, “Revue comique de la semaine,” Le Charivari, December 16, 1849, 2. The caption reads: “L'empereur Soulouque, ayant appris la grossesse de la reine d'Espagne, se hâte de lui expédier en cadeau diplomatique une superbe nourrice noire qui apporte un échantillon de son lait, que Narvaez prenait, à première vue, pour du cirage anglais.” (The Emperor Soulouque, having learned of the pregnancy of the queen of Spain, rushed to send her as a diplomatic gift a superb black wet nurse who brings a sample of her milk, that Narvaez mistook at first view for English [shoe] polish.) General Ramón María Narváez, Duke of Valencia, was a leader of the Moderados (Moderates) faction at the Spanish court. On the Soulouque series, see Grigsby, “Cursed Mimicry.”
56. The caricature is described as “The New Wet Nurse of the Theâtre Français. Caricature about the censorship of two comedies by Dumas: The Youth of Louis XIV and The Youth of Louis XV.” See also Jean-Ignace-Isidore-Gérard Grandville's print, inscribed in French and English: “Arrivez, arrivez, nourrice. … Dieux comme y ressemble à Mosieu [sic]!” / Come, Come nurse. … Good God! what a likeness! (The literal translation would be “how he resembles Monsieur!”) The print depicts the wet nurse as a different species. Lithograph, from Grandville's Les métamorphoses du jour (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1869), no. 11.
57. See Edgar Degas, Nourrice à jardin de Luxembourg, ca. 1874 (Musée Fabre, Montpellier) and Berthe Morisot, Wet Nurse with Julie, 1880 (private collection). On French representations of wet nursing, see Linda Nochlin, “Morisot's Wetnurse: The Construction of Work and Leisure in Impressionist Painting,” in Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 231–42,
at 235: “If prostitution was excluded from the realm of honest work because it involved women selling their bodies, motherhood and the domestic labor of child care were excluded from the realm of work precisely because they were unpaid. … The wet nurse, then, is something of an anomaly in the nineteenth-century scheme of feminine labor. She is like the prostitute in that she sells her body, or its product, for profit and her client's satisfaction; but, unlike the prostitute, she sells her body for a virtuous cause. She is at once a mother—seconde mère, remplaçant—and an employee.”58. The American Elisabeth Finley Thomas is here describing the women's studio at the Académie Julien, Ladies, Lovers and Other People (New York: Longman, Green, 1935), 88–89,
quoted in Susan Waller, The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830–1870 (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006), 46. In the early twentieth century, Paul Milliet likened models seeking work to a “slave market”: “Not one [of the students] seemed aware that he was looking at a degraded human being who was overcome by misery; not one felt the least bit of pity.” Milliet, “Une famille des républicaines fourieristes: Les Milliet,” Cahier de la Quinzaine, 12th ser., 8, sec. 6, 31, quoted in Waller, Invention of the Model, 35. See also Susan Waller, “Realist Quandaries: Posing Professional and Proprietary Models in the 1860s,” Art Bulletin 89, no. 2 (June 2007): 239–65 .59. See Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, História da vida privada no Brasil, vol. 2, Império: A corte e a modernidade nacional ([São Paulo, Brazil]: Companhia das Letras, 1997–98)
. See also Jean-Baptiste Debret's portrait of “Don Pedro II, âgé d'un an et demi, dans le giron de sa gouvernante.” Debret repeatedly depicted wet nurses. See also Agostino Brunias, A Linen Market with a Linen Stall and Vegetable Seller in the West Indies, ca. 1780, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, which includes a topless, turbaned, standing black female figure and another who is seated with her breast revealed as she nurses her baby.60. Expilly, Les femmes et les moeurs du Brésil, 374: “L'homme des tropiques ne tient pas essentiellement à trouver une âme chez l'instrument de ses plaisirs, et son idéal peut très-bien s'incarner dans le type opulent de la nourrice.”
61. The caption reads, “Happy tendency of painting and the arts: they assume more and more the industrial and commercial character that has unfortunately hitherto been lacking.”
62. Paul Dollfus, “Paris qui pose,” La Vie Moderne 9, no. 19 (1887): 300
, quoted in Marie Lathers, “Changing Tastes: Ethnicity and the Artist's Model,” in Jiminez, Dictionary of Artists' Models, 15–16 . Here I am indebted to Lathers's research. See also Paul Dollfus, Modèles d'artistes (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1888).63. Dolfuss, Modèles d'artistes, 122
.64. Ibid., 114.
65. Ibid., 129.
66. Ibid., 125.
67. Pollock, “A Tale of Three Women,” 284.
68. In an especially convoluted and disturbing passage, Sander Gilman (“Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 231–32) asserts that Laure's “presence in both the sketch and in the final painting emphasizes her face, for it is the physiognomy of the black which points to her own sexuality and to that of the white female presented to the viewer unclothed but with her genitalia demurely covered.” Outrageously, Gilman is arguing that Laure, while dressed, is all sex; she does not need to show her body because her face (or physiognomy) alone stands for her sexuality as well as that of the naked white woman who “demurely” covers her genitalia. No one who has looked at Olympia's odd hand would describe the gesture as demure.
69. Clark, The Paintering of Modern Life, 88
.70. Pollock, “A Tale of Three Women,” 294, has made this point, although she hinges it on Orientalism: “In a way, this involves shifting from a stress on race, to finding ways to incorporate difference as specificity while also revealing the women as having some things in common: class becomes the means to provide a gender and a history for them both.”
71. Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, ed. A. Trébuchet and Poirat-Duval, 2 vols. (1836; Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1857), vol. 1, 147
.72. According to Parent-Duchâtelet (ibid., 103–4), women moved in and out of prostitution, working the streets between stints as “our dressmakers, our seamstresses, our menders.” Jill Harsin's examination of Parent's text has led her to conclude that “most prostitutes succeeded, eventually, in saving themselves; prostitution was merely a stage of life rather than life in its entirety.” Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 123
. See also James F. McMillan, France and Women: Gender, Society and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000).73. On Olympia's maid and inanimacy, see Huey Copeland, “Flow and Arrest,”Small Axe (forthcoming).
74. Aristide Bruant, L'argot au XXe siècle: Dictionnaire français-argot (Paris: Librairie Ernest Flammarion, 1901), 290
.75. Ibid., 72.
76. Ibid., 63, 68.
77. Françoise Cachin, entry to Nana, in Manet, 1832–1882, by Cachin, Charles S. Moffett et al., exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), 393
: “Manet greatly admired L'Assommoir.” An April 28, 1877, letter to Manet by the comtesse de Castiglione thanks him for sending her Zola's novel autographed for her by the author.78. Émile Zola, L'assommoir (1877; Paris: Charpentier, 1879), 276: “quand un litre était vide, il faisait la blague de retourner le goulot et de le presser du geste familier aux femmes qui traient les vaches. Encore une négresse qui avait la gueule cassée! Dans un coin de la boutique, le tas des négresses mortes grandissait, un cimitière de bouteilles sur lequel on poussait les ordures de la nappe.”
This essay stems from a book-in-progress entitled Creole Looking: Portraying France's Foreign Relations in the Long Nineteenth Century. It began as a Glass Lecture at Brown University, February 2013; was further developed as an Angela Rosenthal Memorial Lecture at Dartmouth College, February 2014; and given in briefer form as a paper at the conference “Manet Then and Now” at the University of Pennsylvania, April 2014. I thank Kay Dian Kriz, Evelyn Lincoln, Katie Hornstein, André Dombrowski, and Kaja Silverman for these invitations and the audiences for their questions and suggestions. I also wish to thank my wonderful undergraduate research assistants: Ariela Alberts, who assisted me in the first stages of research; Alice Main, who conducted invaluable research on Feyen and prostitution and also found a number of wet-nurse images; Lilly Rosenthal, for researching representations of Brazil at the time of Manet's voyage; Susannah Roberts, for reconstructing the shifting definitions of the word “Creole”; and Valerie Law, for attempting to track down the history of immigration in nineteenth-century France. I am also grateful for the assistance of graduate students Kailani Polzak and Alexandra Courtois and indebted to the perseverance of Kathryn Stine, senior digital curator, Visual Resources Collection, U.C. Berkeley. As always I thank Julie Wolf for her photography and design work. Nancy Locke has generously shared her expertise on the scant evidence concerning Manet's sex life. Finally, I thank Todd Olson for his close readings and suggestions so generously offered in the midst of many obligations. This essay is dedicated to Huey Copeland; we have been thinking about this painting for a very long time.
Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.
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Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities and author of Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (2002), Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal (2012), and Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance (2015) [History of Art Department, University of California, Berkeley, Calif. 94720, [email protected]].