Manet's Olympia: The Stare That Shocked the Salon

If you are asking why Olympia was a scandal: it was the stare. Édouard Manet's painting shows a woman lying on a bed who looks straight out at you and is not embarrassed. That was the shock of the Paris Salon of 1865.

If you are asking where it is: in Room 14 on the ground floor (Level 0) of the Musée d'Orsay, the room given to Manet.

What you see

Manet painted it in 1863, but it was not shown until two years later. He had borrowed the pose from Titian's Venus of Urbino. Where Titian painted a Venus with a little dog, Manet painted a modern Parisian woman. Look at the details: an orchid in her hair, a black ribbon at her neck, one slipper dropped, a black cat at the foot of the bed, and a maid bringing flowers wrapped in paper.

The canvas is about 130 by 190 centimetres, a size usually kept for history and myth, not for a woman on a bed. The model was the painter Victorine Meurent, then about nineteen, who became a painter herself. The maid was modelled by a woman named Laure. Meurent also posed for Luncheon on the Grass, so the two scandals of Manet's early career share a face.

The uproar of 1865

The uproar at the Salon of 1865 was so great that a friend of Manet's later said only the precautions taken by the administration had saved the canvas. Manet had taken a pose from a Renaissance Venus and given it to a woman of his own day, with her own flowers, slipper and cat.

Other pictures in Room 14 had their own trouble. The Fifer was refused by the Salon in 1866, and Émile Zola defended Manet in print.

Manet had seen Velázquez in Madrid, and you can feel it in the Fifer, a boy in uniform against a bare, flat ground. The portrait of Zola, painted in 1868, has Japanese prints and an engraving after Velázquez's Bacchus in the background. The idea that runs through the room is simple: Manet learned from the old masters, then painted people as they were.

How a scandal became a national treasure

After Manet died, Claude Monet organised a public subscription to buy Olympia for France, and nearly a hundred subscribers gave. In March 1890 the state bought the painting from Manet's widow, Suzanne, for 19,415 francs. It hung at the Luxembourg until 1907, then went to the Louvre, then to the Jeu de Paume in 1947, and has been at the Orsay since 1986. The museum's own record gives the credit as offered to the state by public subscription, on the initiative of Claude Monet, in 1890. Standing in front of it, you are looking at a picture that France chose to keep.

A related picture is on the same floor: Cézanne's A Modern Olympia, from 1873 or 1874, hangs in Room 11.

Seeing it at the Orsay

Room 14 also holds Lola de Valence, a Spanish dancer who performed in Paris in 1862, the Fifer, and the portrait of Zola painted at his desk in 1868. Works rotate and rooms are rehung, so check the museum's plan on the day.

In the Roamer guide, Olympia is a stop on the Orsay in an Hour route and the lead picture of The Salon and the Rebels. Listen at your own pace, with no group, and skip anything you do not want. Read next: Manet's Luncheon on the Grass, the earlier picture the Salon jury refused in 1863, and the full guide, Musée d'Orsay: what to see, floor by floor.

Cover: Olympia, Édouard Manet, Musée d'Orsay. Photograph from Wikimedia Commons (Google Art Project), public domain.