Manet | Olympia

About Olympia by Édouard Manet

Manet painted Olympia in 1863 and showed it at the Paris Salon of 1865, where it caused the biggest scandal in the history of the exhibition. Crowds pushed to see it, critics called it obscene, and the organisers had to post guards and rehang it high on the wall, out of reach of walking sticks.

The composition is borrowed openly from Titian's Venus of Urbino: a reclining nude, a servant, a small animal at the foot of the bed. What outraged Paris was everything Manet changed. His model, Victorine Meurent, is not a goddess but a modern Parisian courtesan, and she looks straight back at the viewer with complete self-possession. The details say the rest: an orchid in her hair, a black ribbon at her throat, a gold bracelet, one silk slipper dangling from her foot, and a black cat arching its back where Titian had painted a sleeping dog. Her maid, painted from a model named Laure, brings in a bouquet from an admirer that Olympia ignores.

Manet flattened the figure with hard outlines and an almost shadowless light, which critics of the day read as clumsiness. Painters read it as the future. When Manet died in 1883 Claude Monet organised a public subscription to buy the picture for the French state so that it could never leave the country, and it entered the Louvre in 1907. It now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.

Own a hand-painted Olympia

This is not a print. Every painting we sell is reproduced in oils on canvas, by hand, by professional artists — no giclée, no computer-generated technique.

Manet's scandal was made with paint: broad, flat areas of warm white against a near-black ground, with hard edges where the academy wanted softness. That contrast between pale skin, white linen and a dark interior needs the depth of real oil paint on canvas to hold up on a wall. A hand-painted copy gives you the surface Manet fought for, at the scale of a real painting.

• A range of sizes — choose yours above.
• Framed and ready to hang, gallery wrap, or rolled canvas if you would rather frame it yourself.
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