Olympia, in color
The paperback prints this painting in black and white. Here it is as Manet painted it, with the details worth slowing down for.
Paris, May 1865
Nudes were nothing new at the Salon. Two years earlier the Emperor had bought Cabanel’s Birth of Venus, a goddess drifting on a wave. What crowds could not forgive in Olympia was that she was not a goddess. She was a working woman of Paris, in her own room, and she was looking straight at them.
Visitors jeered and shook their umbrellas at the canvas. The critic Théophile Gautier called her “puny” and the tone of her flesh “dirty.” The administration took precautions to protect the painting, and Manet’s friend Antonin Proust later wrote that it survived only because of them.
Three women
Victorine Meurent
The model · realShe was nineteen when she posed. She was also a painter: the Paris Salon accepted her work in 1876, 1879, 1885 and 1904. For most of a century she was remembered only as a body. Her own Palm Sunday was rediscovered in 2004 and is held in Colombes, outside Paris.
Laure
The woman with the flowers · realManet’s notebook records her by first name, with an address on the rue de Vintimille. She appears in other paintings of his. Almost nothing else is known. The exhibition Posing Modernity (2018–19), curated by Denise Murrell, brought her out of the background.
Victoria Durant
The other Olympia · inventedThe novel’s heroine is fiction: a silk-weaver’s daughter from Lyon who studies with Manet in 1863 and paints her own version of this bed, from four floors up, with a queen’s pearl at her throat.
Titian’s dog, Manet’s cat
Manet built Olympia on a famous model: Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), which he had copied as a young man in Florence. The pose is almost the same. The meaning is turned inside out.
Unsold, then saved
- 1865Shown at the Salon and mocked. Manet keeps it.
- 1883Manet dies. Olympia is still in his studio, unsold.
- 1889–90Claude Monet raises money by public subscription so the painting will not be sold abroad. In March 1890 the French state buys it from Manet’s widow, Suzanne.
- 1907It enters the Louvre.
- 1947It moves to the Jeu de Paume.
- 1986It goes to the new Musée d’Orsay, where it hangs today.
What’s true, what’s invented
True
- The painting, its date and the 1865 scandal
- Victorine Meurent, her career and her Palm Sunday
- Laure’s name and address in Manet’s notebook
- Manet’s mother was a diplomat’s daughter, born in Gothenburg, and Bernadotte’s goddaughter
Invented
- Victoria Durant and the house on the rue Frochot
- The Queen: no such pearl is known to have passed to Madame Manet
- Le premier jour and the charcoal mark on the back of the canvas
- Every modern character, and the theft
Olympia and the novel: FAQ
Is The Other Olympia a true story?
No. It is a novel built around a real painting. Manet’s Olympia (1863), the 1865 scandal, Victorine Meurent and Laure are real. Victoria Durant, the second Olympia, the queen’s pearl and every modern character are invented.
Who was the model for Manet’s Olympia?
Victorine Meurent, who also posed for Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. She was a painter herself: the Paris Salon accepted her work in 1876, the same year it rejected Manet’s. Her Palm Sunday was rediscovered in 2004 and hangs in Colombes, outside Paris. See her other portraits →
Who is the woman holding the flowers in Olympia?
Manet’s notebook records her only as Laure, with an address on the rue de Vintimille. She appears in three of his paintings, and almost nothing else is known about her. Denise Murrell’s exhibition Posing Modernity (2018–19) brought her back into view. The novel does not invent her life.
Why is the painting called Olympia?
No one knows for certain. Historians usually point to the period’s slang for courtesans and to verses by Manet’s friend Zacharie Astruc. In the novel the name comes from a pearl, which is fiction, not a theory.
Is the pearl in Olympia’s ear real?
The small pearl earring is really there in the painting. The novel’s “Queen,” a royal pearl, is invented.
Where can I see Olympia?
At the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it has hung since 1986.
When does The Other Olympia come out?
January 2027, in paperback and Kindle. Join the reading list to hear first.
The Other Olympia
Paris, 1863, and Brooklyn, 2026. A story about the women history looked at but never saw. Coming January 2027.