1867, Édouard Manet, Portrait of Madame Brunet (detail) -- Getty Museum (Los Angeles)
From the museum label: This portrait's bold brushwork, stark contrasts of light and dark, and frank presentation of the model reflect Manet's passion for seventeenth-century Spanish painting and impatience with the portrait conventions of his day. Madame Brunet, the wife of an artist friend, rejected the painting on account of its perceived ugliness. Retaining it in his studio, Manet eventually cut off the bottom portion of the canvas, reducing it from a full-length to a three-quarter-length portrait. He then displayed it in his one-man exhibition in Paris in 1867–a show of independence opposite the official survey of French painting that was part of the Worlds Fair that year.
1867, Édouard Manet, Portrait of Madame Brunet (detail) -- Getty Museum (Los Angeles)
From the museum label: This portrait's bold brushwork, stark contrasts of light and dark, and frank presentation of the model reflect Manet's passion for seventeenth-century Spanish painting and impatience with the portrait conventions of his day. Madame Brunet, the wife of an artist friend, rejected the painting on account of its perceived ugliness. Retaining it in his studio, Manet eventually cut off the bottom portion of the canvas, reducing it from a full-length to a three-quarter-length portrait. He then displayed it in his one-man exhibition in Paris in 1867–a show of independence opposite the official survey of French painting that was part of the Worlds Fair that year.