Victorine Meurent

Victorine Meurent was a French painter and artist's model who appeared in some of the most significant works of 19th-century French art, including Édouard Manet's Olympia (1865) and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863). Though history treated her primarily as a subject, Meurent was a working artist who exhibited at the Paris Salon on at least five occasions — in 1876, 1879, 1885, 1904, and 1906. In 1879, the year Manet was rejected by the Salon, Meurent was accepted. Her paintings have largely disappeared. She died in Colombes, France, in 1927. Her name was not widely known until feminist art historians began recovering her story in the late 20th century.

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