Image: Olympia (1863), oil on canvas painting of dimensions 130.5 cm x 190 cm (51.4” x 74.8”) by French painter Édouard Manet (1832-1883), currently located at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
France acquired Manet’s Olympia in 1890 with a public subscription organized by Claude Monet. Édouard Manet’s early masterworks ‘The Luncheon on the Grass’ and ‘Olympia’ kicked up a great controversy, but they were credited to have become the rallying points for the young generation of painters who created Impressionism, and today these are considered as watershed paintings that mark the genesis of Modern Art.
In Olympia what shocked audiences of those days was neither Olympia's nudity nor her fully clothed maid, but her confrontational gaze and other details identifying her as a courtesan. The orchid flower adoring her hair, black ribbon around her neck, her bracelet, pearl earrings, her cast-off slipper, and the oriental shawl on which she lies, were symbols of wealth and sensuality and they added to the work’s voluptuous look.
Edouard Manet used Victorine Meurent, a very popular model for painters and artists those days for Olympia, and Victorine Meurent was a painter of repute in her own right and she went on to become an accomplished painter.
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