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| Édouard Manet Olympia 1863 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
MONSIEUR MANET – Olympia – The scapegoat of the Salon, the victim of Parisian lynch law. Each passer-by takes a stone and throws it at her face. Olympia is a very crazy piece of Spanish madness, which is a thousand times better than the platitude and inertia of so many canvases on show in the exhibition.
Armed insurrection in the camp of the bourgeois: it is a glass of iced water which each visitor gets full in the face when he sees the BEAUTIFUL courtisane in full bloom.
Painting of the school of Baudelaire, freely executed by a pupil of Goya; the vicious strangeness of the little faubourienne, a woman of the night from Paul Niquet's, from the mysteries of Paris and the nightmares of Edgar Poe. Her look has the sourness of someone prematurely aged, her face the disturbing perfume of a fleur du mal; her body fatigued, corrupted, but painted under a single, transparent light, with the shadows light and fine, the bed and pillows put down in a velvet, modulated grey.
– Jean Ravenel, from his review of the Salon of 1865 in L'Epoque, quoted as translated by T.J. Clark in The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (New York: Knopf, 1985)
Clark cites Jean Ravenel's piece as the only review with any positive content at all out of more than seventy contemporary newspaper and journal articles with discussion of this painting. They document extraordinary levels of rage and contempt excited by Manet's nude, as never at any other nude before. "They were perplexed by the fact that Olympia's class was nowhere but in her body: the cat, the Negress, the orchid, the bunch of flowers, the slippers, the pearl earrings, the choker, the screen, the shawl – they were all lures, they all meant nothing, or nothing in particular. The naked body did without them in the end and did its own narrating."
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| Édouard Manet Woman lying on the beach (Annabel Lee) ca. 1881 drawing Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen |
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| Édouard Manet On the Beach 1873 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Édouard Manet The Balcony 1869 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Édouard Manet Woman with Fans 1873 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Édouard Manet Women at the Races 1865 oil on canvas Cincinnati Art Museum |
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| Édouard Manet Young Lady in Pink 1866 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Édouard Manet Croquet at Boulogne 1871 oil on canvas Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City |
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| Édouard Manet Lady in Pink ca. 1879-81 oil on canvas Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden |
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| Édouard Manet In the Conservatory 1879 oil on canvas Staatliche Museen, Berlin |
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| Édouard Manet Madame Manet on Blue Sofa ca. 1874 pastel Louvre, Paris |
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| Édouard Manet Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe 1863 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Édouard, Manet Olympia 1867 etching, aquatint Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Édouard Manet Portrait of Victorine Meurent 1862 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
Victorine Meurent, an artisan's daughter and a painter in her own right, was the model who posed for Olympia (and for the foreground woman in Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe). Manet's clothed portrait of her immediately above was painted earlier than any of the others.