Isabelle Lemonnier with a Muff

In Isabelle Lemonnier with a Muff, Édouard Manet sets a carefully described face above a body that becomes increasingly loose and sketchy. The young woman turns towards us while her brown coat follows another direction. Her hands disappear into the rounded fur muff near the lower left, where dark outlines remain conspicuous against thinly painted clothing.

The Dallas Museum of Art dates this oil portrait to about 1879–80.^[1]

Who Was Isabelle Lemonnier

Isabelle Lemonnier was the daughter of a successful Parisian jeweller and the younger sister of Marguerite Charpentier, whose portrait with her children was painted by Renoir. Manet portrayed Isabelle repeatedly during his later years; the Dallas museum counts six oil portraits, alongside works in pastel and watercolour.^[1][2]

Each portrait treats a familiar person through different choices of dress, scale and pose. A different portrait can isolate another aspect of her appearance without acting as a preliminary stage for this one.

A Turned Pose

The body's broad diagonal begins with the muff at the lower left and rises towards the shoulder at the right. The head introduces a different direction, turning back out of the surrounding clothing. This contrast gives the figure a sense of movement even though the composition contains no clearly described setting or action.

The Dallas museum reads the pose as suggesting a woman moving left and glancing over her shoulder.^[1] The impression comes from the painting's arrangement: the torso seems to continue one way while the face briefly addresses the viewer.

Around her, gray space leaves the silhouette exposed. There is no furniture to hold the body in place and no doorway to explain where she might be going. The encounter is carried by the change of direction within the figure itself.

Face and Hat

The dark hat rises well above the forehead, giving the head a compact, rounded surround. A small golden-looking ring stands out near its upper centre. Below, the hair breaks into curved locks that cross the forehead, connecting the broad mass of the hat with the smaller divisions of the face.

Manet describes the face through patches that remain visibly separate. Pale touches sit beside warmer pinks and browns, while darker strokes sharpen the eyes and eyebrows. These differences allow the cheeks and nose to appear rounded without making their surface uniformly smooth.

A dark blue-purple bow projects beside the jaw. Against the high brown collar, it marks a small interruption in the warmer clothing. The pale chin sits close to that collar, so that the face appears both exposed to us and closely enclosed by the costume.

The Coat and Muff

The coat gives the figure most of its weight. Its long brown passages stretch from shoulder to waist, with changes of tone suggesting the sleeve and the turn of the back. Curved dark marks around the near arm help separate that sleeve from the adjoining body, even where both share a similar colour.

The muff is a fur handwarmer, enclosing the sitter's hands. Here it also becomes a large rounded shape that projects away from the coat. Manet emphasizes its outer curve and the dark opening above it, while leaving its lower surface comparatively thin. The hands are understood through their position inside it rather than through a display of separate fingers.

Several dark arcs repeat and overlap around this area. Lower down, brown strokes become more widely spaced and the pale field shows between them. The rounded accessory remains readable as an object, but its edges also draw attention to the brush moving across the canvas.

Different Degrees of Finish

Art historian Nancy Locke describes the portrait as presenting contrasting levels of finish. In her reading, the rounded head gives way to a flatter treatment of the coat, followed by a lower passage that makes painting's construction unusually apparent.^[3]

Locke also compares the blurred gray edge and doubled contours with effects produced by long exposures in nineteenth-century photography.^[3] This comparison offers a way of understanding the figure's instability without turning the portrait into a record of one frozen gesture.

The transition can be followed across the whole figure. Near the eyes, small distinctions carry a great deal of descriptive work; around the lower clothing, broader curves and open intervals dominate. Looking shifts between recognizing a woman and following the material marks that hold her image together. For a wider account of these choices, see Manet's style and technique.

A Pastel of the Same Sitter

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds another portrait of Isabelle, dated 1879–82. It is pastel on canvas, a separate work measuring 55.9 × 46.4 cm.^[2] Its narrower view of the sitter offers a useful comparison with the more extensive body and clothing in Dallas.

In the pastel, her face turns towards the right. Dark swept-up hair outlines the pale forehead and cheek, while the high light collar leads down into a loosely indicated upper garment. The light blue-gray background continues around the shoulders, whose boundaries are only lightly marked.

A small rose and green leaves occupy the lower right. Their compact shape provides a second point of attention below the head. The Dallas picture distributes its dark clothing over a much larger area; the pastel concentrates the sitter's presence in the head, with pale space extending beneath it. The difference in framing changes how much work the face must do within each composition.

Illustrated Letters

Manet's portraits of Isabelle belong alongside a personal exchange in words and images. During the summer of 1880, he sent her letters decorated with watercolour sketches.^[2] One surviving letter, dated 9 July at Bellevue, is recorded in the Louvre's collections. It asks for news and mentions Léon and a party; the museum describes a seated cat in gray wash on its other side.^[4]

Such a letter brings the relationship into the scale of everyday correspondence. A brief message, a drawing and an expectation of a reply accompany the more sustained attention of the portraits. Together they show several ways in which Manet addressed the same person, without making one painted expression a complete account of their friendship.

The Painting in Dallas

Rouart and Wildenstein catalogue the oil as Isabelle Lemonnier au manchon, placing it around 1879 in Manet's rue d'Amsterdam period. Their catalogue also notes that the dates of the six oil portraits had been interpreted differently.^[5] The group should therefore be approached as a series of varied treatments rather than a firmly ordered progression.

The Dallas painting entered the museum through the gift of Mr. and Mrs. Algur H. Meadows and the Meadows Foundation.^[1] Its title draws attention to an accessory, while its changing treatment of the figure invites looking from the face down to the loose outlines below.