Lola de Valence by Édouard Manet

Lola stands with her feet crossed, a fan hanging from one hand and a broad, flowered skirt spreading around her. The costume is exuberant; the pose is contained. Behind her, stage scenery opens onto a narrow glimpse of a theatre. Manet gives the dancer a substantial presence without showing her in the middle of a dance.

Painted in 1862 and subsequently reworked, Lola de Valence belongs to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. The oil on canvas measures 123 × 92 cm.^[1][2] Charles Baudelaire wrote a quatrain about Lola, Zacharie Astruc composed a serenade, and Manet returned to her figure in watercolour, lithography and etching. Following those versions reveals how much could change while the dancer's recognisable pose remained.

Lola and the Spanish Ballet

The sitter was Lola Melea, a leading dancer in a visiting Spanish troupe associated with Mariano Camprubi. The company performed La Flor de Sevilla at the Paris Hippodrome in the late summer and autumn of 1862. Manet's interest produced several images of its performers, including this individual portrait and the group composition The Spanish Ballet.^[2]

In the group painting, now at the Phillips Collection, Lola sits towards the left. A pale pink skirt edged with dark flounces surrounds her knees, and her hands rest across her lap. Nearby, Anita Montés and Camprubi dance with raised arms. Guitarists occupy the outer parts of the scene. Lola's seated figure belongs to the company but remains distinct from its central dancing couple.^[2][3]

The comparison helps explain the stillness of her individual portrait. Manet could place performers in an arrangement suggesting music and movement, yet he also found a subject in the dancer at rest. In Lola de Valence, the fan, shoes, mantilla and skirt establish her professional costume. The turned feet and bent arm preserve a sense of bodily control even though no sequence of steps unfolds before us.

The Spanish Ballet also combines observation with deliberate staging. A green stool appears at the lower right, while two cloaked spectators in the background derive from Goya's imagery. Juliet Wilson-Bareau describes the composition as an assembly of performers, props and borrowed pictorial elements.^[2]

These pictures belong beside Manet's other early Spanish subjects, including The Spanish Singer. The attraction involved performers and their dress as well as older painting. Lola offered him a contemporary person whose costume could sustain a remarkably varied arrangement of light, dark and brilliant colour.

Costume and the Paused Pose

The skirt occupies much of the portrait's width. Its broad dark shape is broken by flowers in red, orange, yellow and green. Red trimming follows the lower edge and marks other bands across the fabric. At a distance, these details can merge into an impression of richness; closer attention reveals separate strokes and small bursts of colour resting against black.

Above this heavy shape, the costume becomes lighter and more transparent. The white mantilla frames Lola's dark hair and falls around her shoulders. A blue passage crosses her chest, edged by red accents. The puffed sleeve at the left of the image includes dark horizontal bands and little glimpses of the arm beneath. Cream, grey and pale blue keep the whites from becoming a single unbroken area.

Her exposed forearm makes a comparatively simple diagonal across the skirt. A bracelet interrupts it near the wrist, and the fingers descend towards the partly opened fan. The fan repeats the pale tones of the upper costume, carrying them into the lower half of the picture. Its ribs provide a small, orderly pattern within the more irregular floral marks around it.

The other arm bends at the waist. That gesture broadens the upper body while the crossed feet gather the figure together below. Pink shoes and pale stockings emerge beneath the skirt, smaller and more delicately defined than the mass of fabric above them. The stance combines an ample silhouette with a narrow point of support.

Lola's face is framed by the much brighter mantilla. Dark eyebrows, hair and eyes give it a concentrated definition, while comparatively restrained modelling describes the cheeks and mouth. Her head turns slightly within the larger arrangement of shoulders and skirt. The face remains a portrait within the display of costume, holding attention without matching the dress's profusion of marks.

The grey floor provides room for a broad shadow. Its dark shape runs away from her feet towards the right, helping to seat the figure within the shallow stage space. Across the whole painting, Manet alternates these relatively broad surfaces with concentrated particulars: the bracelet, the fan's ribs, the red trimming and the features of the face. The eye moves between the dancer's bodily presence and the separate painted touches that construct it.

The Earlier Background and the Theatre Setting

The stage setting belongs to the painting's later history. Wilson-Bareau's catalogue entry records a plain background when the canvas was shown in 1863 and again in 1867. Manet subsequently enlarged and transformed it, adding the scenery and the glimpse of the theatre beyond.^[2]

Kathryn Kremnitzer's study describes extensions at the top and bottom of the canvas and places this revision during or after June 1867. The earlier arrangement survives in drawings and prints made after the painting, as well as in contemporary caricature.^[4] The museum's date of 1862 identifies the portrait's origin; the picture's present appearance incorporates further work.

In the oil as it now exists, large panels press close behind Lola. At the right, their uneven edge opens onto a small area of theatre seating. The opening introduces another scale: the dancer fills the foreground while the distant interior is reduced to clustered lights and colours. The stage scenery makes her position feel provisional, somewhere between a portrait sitting and the spaces around a performance.

The setting also changes the relationship between person and background. Against a plain ground, the pose and costume can stand with little distraction. The later scenery supplies enclosing forms, a location and a passage towards an imagined audience. Looking between the oil and the etching makes that change especially clear, since the printed figure retains an earlier, less specific surrounding space.

Kremnitzer proposes that experiments with aquatint may have encouraged Manet to reconsider the oil painting.^[4] This remains a suggestion about the exchange between media. What the different versions establish more securely is his continued attention to the same figure: Lola could be reduced to a small sheet, rendered in monochrome and returned to a larger painted setting.

Baudelaire and the Pink and Black Jewel

Baudelaire's quatrain offers another concentrated version of the portrait. In the 1866 edition of Les Épaves, it appears under the title Lola de Valence:

Entre tant de beautés que partout on peut voir, Je comprends bien, amis, que le désir balance ; Mais on voit scintiller en Lola de Valence Le charme inattendu d'un bijou rose et noir.^[5]

An English rendering of these lines is:

Among so many beauties seen on every side, I understand, my friends, that desire should hesitate; Yet in Lola de Valence one sees the sparkle Of the unexpected charm of a pink and black jewel.

The final image compresses a person and a painting into a small, precious object. The opening acknowledges an abundance of beauty and the possibility of indecision. Lola then emerges through a particular combination of colour and an unexpected flash of attraction. The poem makes looking into an act of selection, ending with the sharp colour pairing that has remained associated with the portrait.

Pink and black do not describe every colour in the canvas. The floral skirt includes conspicuous red, yellow and green, while the upper costume brings white and blue into play. Wilson-Bareau suggests a possible echo in the seated Lola of The Spanish Ballet, whose pink skirt and dark flounces correspond more directly with Baudelaire's phrase.^[2]

The 1866 edition includes an editorial note explaining that the verses were composed as an inscription for Manet's portrait. It also rebuts readers who had found an obscene meaning in the final image.^[5] The note belongs to the poem's reception: even four lines could become a contested companion to a painting.

Kremnitzer discusses Baudelaire's instructions for lettering the poem and the evidence of an early caricature showing verses displayed beneath the portrait.^[4] Words could therefore accompany Lola as a visible part of its presentation. They directed attention towards her while offering an interpretation that viewers could accept, question or remember independently.

Émile Zola took up that association in his defence of Manet in 1867. He treated the quatrain as a concise judgement on the painter's personality, connecting its colours with broad touches and strong oppositions in the painting.^[6] His account is a critic's argument for Manet's way of painting. It shows how the poem could become a language for discussing the image's construction as well as its sitter's appeal.

Astruc and the Serenade

Zacharie Astruc's tribute took a different form. His Lola de Valence was a serenade with his own words and music. Manet supplied a lithographic cover, registered on 7 March 1863 and printed by Lemercier et Compagnie.^[4] Baudelaire's quatrain and Astruc's song thus belonged to separate responses to the dancer.

The cover brings Lola much closer. The full standing figure gives way to a cropped view, framed by the curved title above her. The fan and Manet's signature participate in the rounded arrangement. Black marks describe the dark hair, patterned sleeve and floral costume, while the light mantilla preserves a bright surround for the face.^[4]

The changed format makes a different demand on the portrait. A sheet-music cover must accommodate lettering and identify a musical work; the figure shares that space with Astruc's name and the title. Manet adjusted the composition rather than reproducing the oil at a smaller size. The dancer becomes both an individual likeness and the public image of a serenade.

Manet also gave Astruc one of the related watercolours.^[4] Their exchange connects several kinds of artistic work around the same performer: the painter supplied an image for the composer's publication, and a version on paper became a personal gift. The resulting objects carried Lola's likeness into settings quite different from the exhibition wall.

Two Watercolours after the Painting

Two small watercolours preserve the standing composition: one at the Musée d'Orsay and the other at the Harvard Art Museums. They were made after the oil painting as Manet explored its translation into print.^[4] Their small scale could suggest preliminary sketches, but their place in this sequence gives them another purpose.

The Orsay sheet carries incised lines. Kremnitzer and her collaborators describe how these marks become visible under light directed across the surface and how some correspond with contours in the etching. The evidence supports a tracing and transfer process between the drawn image and the copperplate.^[4] A line could serve both to describe Lola and to help move her figure from one surface to another.

The Harvard watercolour, dated about 1862, combines watercolour, graphite, black ink and gouache on tan wove paper. It measures 25.2 × 17.5 cm and entered the collection through Grenville L. Winthrop's bequest in 1943. Its earlier history includes Manet's gift to Astruc.^[7]

Technical examination of this Harvard sheet found graphite beneath and above passages of colour. Kremnitzer explains that Manet could sketch a form, add wash and then reinforce a contour with further pencil. Colour was consequently part of the work's development, with drawing continuing around and across it.^[4] The sequence helps make sense of a sheet that combines tentative marks with very deliberate accents.

The examination also identified lead white in highlights that have darkened and vermilion in red passages; some pink wash has faded. These findings concern the Harvard watercolour.^[4] They explain why its present colours require care when compared with the painting or the other sheet. Each object has its own materials and subsequent changes, even when the recognisable figure brings them together.

The Etching and its Poem

In the etched version, the bright costume becomes an arrangement of black lines, light paper and granular tone. Fine marks describe the mantilla and face, while darker concentrations give weight to the skirt. Aquatint, a process used to print areas of tone, helps build the surrounding darkness. The pale arm and stockings stand out against it.

The Metropolitan Museum's impression is dated 1863 and catalogued as the sixth state of eight, made with etching, aquatint and roulette. Its plate measures 26.4 × 18.1 cm, and the sheet measures 39.5 × 29.5 cm.^[8] A state records a stage in the alteration of a printing plate; successive impressions can preserve different amounts of work and lettering.

Lola faces in the same direction as she does in the painting. The full costume and crossed feet remain, but the later oil's theatre scenery is absent. A dark, comparatively undifferentiated background presses around the light upper body. The result gives the fabric's pattern and the dancer's outline another balance, with tone taking over some of the work performed by colour in the oil.

The Met sheet includes the publisher's and printer's lettering and Baudelaire's poem beneath the image. Kremnitzer relates this lettered form to the Société des Aquafortistes publication of 1 October 1863.^[4] In this printing, the poem's third line uses dans where the 1866 Les Épaves text uses en.^[5][8] The slight difference belongs to the verses' movement between printed forms.

Keeping the lower margin in view changes the experience of the print. Lola's figure occupies one field; names, addresses and poetry occupy another. The sheet presents a collaboration through which a painted portrait became a published image. It belongs within Manet's wider practice of printmaking, where a familiar composition could acquire a different scale, texture and audience.

Exhibitions and the Camondo Bequest

The oil appeared at Galerie Martinet in 1863 and in Manet's independent exhibition near the avenue de l'Alma in 1867. The related etching was shown at the Salon des Refusés in 1863.^[1][2] These separate exhibition histories are part of the portrait's circulation across media.

Jean-Baptiste Faure acquired the painting in 1873. It later passed through dealers before entering Isaac de Camondo's collection in 1893. His bequest brought it into the French national collection in 1911; it was first displayed in 1914. After its period at the Jeu de Paume, it was assigned to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986.^[1]

The painting now brings together several moments of that longer history. Its figure began with a contemporary performer in 1862; its setting carries Manet's later revision. Poems, music and prints preserve other encounters with the same likeness. The fan, mantilla and crossed feet remain familiar across these changes, while each medium makes a different portrait of the dancer possible.