It was once widely believed that after Gare Saint-Lazare, Victorine Meurent descended “into oblivion,” as the writer George Moore put it (qtd Siebert 269). Manet’s biographer Adolphe Tabarant claimed she became an alcoholic, reduced to playing her guitar for pennies (Lipton 7). Victorine was defeated in real life as she was in paint.
Yet Victorine did, indeed, have a life after Manet - a life that went in some surprising directions. Sometime before Gare Saint-Lazare, for instance, she began studying painting herself. Was this perhaps a way to take back control for herself after years of constantly being posed and dressed by others? It is intriguing that she chose as her teacher not her sometime lover Alfred Stevens, an established painter whom she often modeled for, but the obscure Etienne Leroy (Brombert 116). Did Victorine choose him so she could be sure to be free of control? Whether or not control was her motivation for taking up painting, her transformation from model to artist was a role reversal worthy of a Manet canvas.
Yet Victorine could never fully escape her greatest claim to fame. When times got rough, she promoted her art by passing out cards stamped with her name and “I amOlympia” (Lipton 152). Intriguingly, her first submission to the Salon was an 1876 self-portrait, now lost. Were the judges caught by the transfixing gaze of Olympia staring from the canvas? The only description we have of the painting is Tabarant’s curt summation: “wretched little daubs” (qtd. Lipton 6). We do know, however, that it was accepted (as neither of Manet’s submissions were) and that Victorine exhibited at least three more works at the Salon in later years (Brombert 116).
Her newfound profession did not bring in much cash, however. In 1883, after Manet’s death, she wrote to his widow to ask for money. The letter contains Victorine’s only surviving words; everything else historians know about her come from other sources. Interestingly, Victorine’s sense of independence comes through even when begging alms. Victorine recalled that she had rejected Manet’s offers to give her royalties from sales of his paintings of her: “M. Manet… often said that if he sold his pictures he would set aside a gratuity for me…. I refused, thanking him warmly, and added that when I could no longer pose I would remind him of his promise” (qtd. Brombert 115). Victorine’s rejection of Manet’s gift is remarkable (if her story is true), given her certainly straightened circumstances at the time. Why refuse a small but needed gift from an employer, friend, or lover (whichever Manet was)? It seems likely Victorine saw Manet’s charity at least partly as an attempt to control her, to keep her in his debt. She would be captive in the net of Manet’s generosity. Victorine would keep her independence, it seems, at any cost.
By the end of her life, however, that cost may have become too high. By 1893 she was living in a one-room fifth floor apartment in a shabby neighborhood. She was then forty-nine, and very much faded; one visitor brought by Toulouse-Lautrec, one of her few friends, described her as a “shapeless old woman” (qtd Siebert 310). Yet she seems to have retained some of her old charisma. When she died a truly old woman in 1928, she was living with another woman who may have been her lover (Lipton 166). For Victorine, life did not end after Manet; if it was slightly less glamorous, this seemed to be an acceptable sacrifice. What Victorine really wanted, it seems, was control, independence, in whatever form she could get it. Perhaps this was what she really had in common with Manet.
Manet, Edouard. Portrait of Victorine Meurent. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.