Self-Portrait

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.​