Baudelaire's Mistress Reclining

Nowhere is the novelty of Manet’s technique more apparent than in this strange portrait of the Creole woman, Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s “aging Infanta,” painted in 1862 when she was sick and half-paralysed. Her hard, swarthy face contrasts with her immense striped crinoline, which is treated broadly, almost sketchily, and the delicate embroidery on the curtain hung over the windows of the Rue Guyot studio that Manet occupied at that time.