Olympia

The story of Olympia

The first thing Olympia does is look at you. Not past you, not down at a book, straight at you, with the flat patience of someone who has already decided what you are worth. Manet painted her in 1863 and the Paris Salon of 1865 nearly came apart over it: a nude who was plainly a working woman, a maid holding flowers from a client, a black cat arching at the foot of the bed. The pose borrows from Titian, but the warmth is gone and something sharper has replaced it. Today it hangs in the Musée d'Orsay and it still lands the same way. People stop in front of it and go quiet.

On a wall, Olympia is cooler than most nudes. The palette is chalk white, cream, warm gray, and one hard black stroke of ribbon at the throat, with the dark background swallowing everything else. It reads as elegant rather than sensual, which is why it works in a bedroom, a study, or a hallway with good lighting, and why it suits modern, monochrome, or Parisian-apartment interiors better than anything floral. It is a wide, horizontal image. We offer it up to the Medium at 23.6 × 16 in, and that size gives the figure enough presence to hold a wall on its own above a dresser or a console. The Petite at 16.3 × 11 in works well in a framed pair with another Manet.

Hang it next to the painting it answers, Venus of Urbino, and the contrast becomes the point. Manet's other Salon scandal, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, shares the same cool, unsentimental light, and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère gives you the same direct gaze twenty years later. More from Édouard Manet.

We print this from a high-resolution public-domain photograph of the Orsay canvas, on archival canvas in our own studio, with the colors matched to the museum reference rather than brightened.