In May 2025, I got here throughout a unprecedented {photograph} on the English Wikipedia website dedicated to Jeanne Duval. Duval was the supposedly un-photographed Haiti-born long-term mistress and muse of the French poet Charles Baudelaire.
The portrait, displaying a seated girl wearing nice, bourgeois clothes, had been posted to Wikipedia by a scholar of artwork historian Justine de Young. De Young writes concerning the portrait for instance of self-fashioning in her latest ebook, The Art of Parisian Chic.
Printed on a small carte de visite (a photographic visiting card) and bearing the date August 18 1862, the picture had been found within the French archives by a special researcher, as talked about in my latest TLS article, and documented on-line by her in 2021.
Duval fascinates many feminist and postcolonial students, partly due to how little is understood about her. Intrigued, I visited the archives myself final summer season to see the picture. There, I noticed a second carte de visite sitting beside the primary. It bore the identical identify, Jeanne, the identical date, and was from the identical images studio – the Atelier Nadar. The two playing cards had been entered on the legal deposit register as “idem” (the identical).
This second Jeanne was standing, in an unusually inflexible pose for {a photograph} of this kind. She was sporting an off-the-shoulder night robe, and her hair was hanging straight, dressed with a easy hair band.
Bibliothèque nationale de France.
A high-resolution digital model revealed sturdy resemblances to the sitter within the first {photograph}, similarities that had not been instantly apparent from the small playing cards. The photos confirmed the same hairline, brow blemish and ring on the identical finger. Clearly, if the primary {photograph} was of Duval, then this one was too.
Particularly fascinating, nonetheless, was the crucifix sitting on the collarbone, and the massive earrings. Similar jewelry is worn by the sitter in Edouard Manet’s portrait Lady with a Fan (1862), often known as Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining. The latter title had been inscribed on the again of the portray sooner or later both throughout or previous to the posthumous stock of the artist’s studio.
The sitter’s awkward pose and inscrutable facial features have usually been understood to level to the hardship and illness that Duval was enduring on the time. She was in dire monetary straits and had been experiencing paralysis on her proper aspect since a stroke in 1859. However, the identification of Manet’s sitter as Duval is typically disputed by students, for a number of causes.
The card portrait of standing “Jeanne”, made the identical 12 months as each the oil portrait and its watercolour research, reveals very comparable facial options, expression and shadowing. Art historians Griselda Pollock and Therese Dolan have speculated that Manet labored from {a photograph} or carte de visite of Duval for Lady with a Fan. The hyperlinks between the {photograph} of standing Jeanne and Manet’s oil and watercolour portraits seem to substantiate Duval as the topic of each the work (watercolour and oil) and of each images.
Why have been these images taken?
Was Duval, due to this fact, modelling for Manet, in these images? It ought to be famous that Manet, Félix Nadar (the proprietor of the images studio) and Baudelaire have been all shut pals, and that Duval had separated from the poet, apparently definitively, in 1861.
incamerastock/Alamy
Duval might have provided, or been invited, to sit down for Nadar’s images (and not directly for Manet, who usually labored from images) in change for cash. We know that she had approached not less than one different good friend of Baudelaire’s in 1862 to attempt to promote the poet’s possessions to him.
In assist of the monetisation speculation is the truth that she is holding a driving crop within the {photograph} with the crucifix. Perhaps she or they hoped {that a} card portrait of the sadistic-angelic muse of Baudelaire’s poetry quantity The Flowers of Evil (1857) would have market worth.
British Library
Alternatively, Baudelaire might have commissioned portraits of his former mistress for his personal functions. Despite his anger and resentment in direction of Duval after their separation, there may be proof in his letters and sketches of his persevering with loyalty and affection.
Or maybe Duval wished to set the file straight about who she was. Maybe she needed the world to know that she was not the truth is the diabolical, sexualised muse on the centre of Baudelaire’s scandalous quantity of poetry, and that she was, as a substitute, somebody who dressed within the (presumably borrowed) elegant, respectable clothes seen within the first {photograph}.
Perhaps the crucifix, and the ring that’s seen on the marriage finger in each images, have been, equally, supposed to make a press release about her ethical values. However, sure particulars within the second picture, together with the driving crop, naked shoulders and huge earrings, counsel that correction of the file was not her intention.
It is probably going that the cartes de visite, if they’re certainly of Duval, have been financially motivated, whether or not they have been her thought or the suggestion of Nadar, Manet or Baudelaire. It is feasible additionally that self-fashioning was a part of her intention, although if that’s the case, the story she was telling was not clear.
French researchers have lately found that Duval died in a poorhouse simply six years after these portraits have been made. Until then, no person appeared to know what had change into of her. These images converse, to me not less than, of Duval’s resistance to straightforward framing and of her quiet dignity.
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