1. Victorine-Louise Meurent was a French painter and a model for painters.
22 Facts About Victorine Meurent
1. 2.
Victorine-Louise Meurent was born in Paris on Sunday, February 18,1844, to a family of artisans.
3.
Victorine Meurent's mother was a milliner and her father was a patinator of bronzes.
4.
In 1860, at the age of sixteen, Meurent began modeling in the studio of Thomas Couture and she may have studied art at his atelier for women.
5.
Victorine Meurent first modeled for Manet in 1862, for his painting The Street Singer.
6.
Victorine Meurent was particularly noticeable for her petite stature that earned her the nickname La Crevette, and for her red hair, which is depicted as very bright in Manet's watercolor copy of Olympia.
7.
Victorine Meurent sang, reportedly performing at cafe-concerts, a type of musical establishment associated with the Belle Epoque in France, which initially were held outdoors.
8.
Victorine Meurent's name remains forever associated with Manet's masterpieces of 1863, Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia, which feature nude portrayals of her.
9.
The last Manet painting in which Victorine Meurent appears is The Railway.
10.
In 1875, Victorine Meurent began studying with the portraitist Etienne Leroy.
11.
Work by Victorine Meurent was included in the 1885 and 1904 exhibitions as well.
12.
Victorine Meurent continued to support herself by modeling through the 1880s for Norbert Goeneutte, an artist best known for his etchings, and for Toulouse-Lautrec.
13.
Victorine Meurent was inducted into the Societe des Artistes Francais in 1903, with the support of Charles Hermann-Leon and Tony Robert-Fleury, the founder of the Societe.
14.
Victorine Meurent lived there for the remainder of her life in a house that she owned jointly with Marie Dufour.
15.
Victorine Meurent continued to refer to herself as an artist into her seventies, as recorded in a census from 1921.
16.
Victorine Meurent's life inspired two historical novels and she appears as a character in several others.
17.
Victorine Meurent appears in the book as a middle-aged woman, living in a lesbian relationship with a famous courtesan.
18.
Victorine Meurent appears as such in both Mademoiselle Victorine: a Novel by Debra Finerman and A Woman With No Clothes On by V R Main.
19.
Victorine Meurent appears as a character in a novel by Christopher Moore that is titled Sacre Bleu.
20.
The novel Victorine is about Meurent and her journey to become a painter.
21.
The main character of Ruth Reichl's 2024 novel The Paris Novel embarks on a search for Victorine Meurent's lost paintings in 1980's Paris.
22.
In film, Victorine Meurent is featured as a character in Intimate Lives: The Women of Manet.