Rediscovered photograph sheds light on Jeanne Duval – Manet’s Lady with a Fan
In May 2025, I came across an extraordinary photograph on the English Wikipedia site devoted to Jeanne Duval. Duval was the supposedly un-photographed Haiti-born long-term mistress and muse of the French poet Charles Baudelaire.
The portrait, showing a seated woman dressed in fine, bourgeois clothing, had been posted to Wikipedia by a student of art historian Justine de Young. De Young writes about the portrait as an example of self-fashioning in her recent book, The Art of Parisian Chic.
Printed on a small carte de visite (a photographic visiting card) and bearing the date August 18 1862, the image had been discovered in the French archives by a different researcher, as mentioned in my recent TLS article, and documented online by her in 2021.
Duval fascinates many feminist and postcolonial scholars, partly because of how little is known about her. Intrigued, I visited the archives myself last summer to see the image. There, I noticed a second carte de visite sitting beside the first. It bore the same name, Jeanne, the same date, and was from the same photography studio – the Atelier Nadar. The two cards had been entered on the legal deposit register as “idem” (the same).
This second Jeanne was standing, in an unusually rigid pose for a photograph of this type. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder evening gown, and her hair was hanging straight, dressed with a simple hair band.
A high-resolution digital version revealed strong resemblances to the sitter in the first photograph, similarities that had not been immediately obvious from the small cards. The pictures showed a similar hairline, forehead blemish and ring on the same finger. Clearly, if the first photograph was of Duval, then this one was too.
Particularly interesting, however, was the crucifix sitting on the collarbone, and the large earrings. Similar jewellery is worn by the sitter in Edouard Manet’s portrait Lady with a Fan (1862), also known as Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining. The latter title had been inscribed on the back of the painting at some point either during or prior to the posthumous inventory of the artist’s studio.
The sitter’s awkward pose and inscrutable facial expression have often been understood to point to the hardship and sickness that Duval was enduring at the time. She was in dire financial straits and had been experiencing paralysis on her right side since a stroke in 1859. However, the identification of Manet’s sitter as Duval is sometimes disputed by scholars, for a few reasons.
The card portrait of standing “Jeanne”, made the same year as both the oil portrait and its watercolour study, shows very similar facial features, expression and shadowing. Art historians Griselda Pollock and Therese Dolan have speculated that Manet worked from a photograph or carte de visite of Duval for Lady with a Fan. The links between the photograph of standing Jeanne and Manet’s oil and watercolour portraits appear to confirm Duval as the subject of both the paintings (watercolour and oil) and of both photographs.
Why were these photographs taken?
Was Duval, therefore, modelling for Manet, in these photographs? It should be noted that Manet, Félix Nadar (the owner of the photography studio) and Baudelaire were all close friends, and that Duval had separated from the poet, apparently definitively, in 1861.
Duval may have offered, or been invited, to sit for Nadar’s photographs (and indirectly for Manet, who often worked from photographs) in exchange for money. We know that she had approached at least one other friend of Baudelaire’s in 1862 to try to sell the poet’s possessions to him.
In support of the monetisation hypothesis is the fact that she is holding a riding crop in the photograph with the crucifix. Perhaps she or they hoped that a card portrait of the sadistic-angelic muse of Baudelaire’s poetry volume The Flowers of Evil (1857) would have market value.
Alternatively, Baudelaire may have commissioned portraits of his former mistress for his own purposes. Despite his anger and resentment towards Duval after their separation, there is evidence in his letters and sketches of his continuing loyalty and affection.
Or perhaps Duval wished to set the record straight about who she was. Maybe she wanted the world to know that she was not in fact the diabolical, sexualised muse at the centre of Baudelaire’s scandalous volume of poetry, and that she was, instead, someone who dressed in the (presumably borrowed) elegant, respectable clothing seen in the first photograph.
Perhaps the crucifix, and the ring that is visible on the wedding finger in both photographs, were, similarly, intended to make a statement about her moral values. However, certain details in the second image, including the riding crop, bare shoulders and large earrings, suggest that correction of the record was not her aim.
It is likely that the cartes de visite, if they are indeed of Duval, were financially motivated, whether they were her idea or the suggestion of Nadar, Manet or Baudelaire. It is possible also that self-fashioning was part of her aim, though if that is the case, the story she was telling was not clear.
French researchers have recently discovered that Duval died in a poorhouse just six years after these portraits were made. Until then, nobody seemed to know what had become of her. These photographs speak, to me at least, of Duval’s resistance to easy framing and of her quiet dignity.
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Maria C. Scott will be publishing an academic article on this subject in the journal French Studies in due course.