Not long after Edouard Manet painted this portrait of Victorine Meurent (1866), a favored model who had also inhabited the bold Olympia and the alluring woman in Luncheon on the Grass, it was purchased for the Met in 1889. (Sorry for the slight crop)
Here, though in a chaste white dressing gown and elegant upright pose, she still emits a sense of mystery.
The Met notes recent scholars have interpreted it as an allegory of the 5 senses:
Parrot =hearing
Nosegay=smell
Orange=taste
Monocle=sight and touch
But even without that deeper dive, we see that this is a woman who is self aware and comfortable in her own skin, naked or clothed. In her case, the famous male gaze is met in kind.
Cecile Walton, a modern Millie artist in Glasgow of the 1920s
This self portrait riff by Cecile Walton on Manet’s Olympia replete with not very PC black Sambo doll instead of black cat and nurse instead of maid and baby standing in for flowers from 1920 shows just how screwed up referencing the masters can get. Walton was part of the Edinburgh group which prized symbolist motifs. That said, the title, Romance belies it’s matter-of-fact treatment of her two children as she gets her foot massage. Having just re-seen the actual Olympia at the Musee d’Orsay, one of their most respected paintings, I am hard pressed to even make the comparison. Yet I like this painting and wonder about the very forward thinking woman who painted it who has more or less disappeared into obscurity. She lived for a time in a menage a trois with her husband, Eric Robertson, also an artist, and alcoholic—obviously a problem of the period—and another artist Dorothy Johnstone when this work was painted. Hmmm……