Nana

A young woman in a corset powders her face before a mirror and turns to look at us, while a man in evening dress waits on the sofa. The Salon refused Manet's Nana in 1877, so he put it in a shop window.

The story behind the painting

Manet completed Nana in 1877 and sent it to the Paris Salon that same year, but it was refused because it was judged contemptuous of the morality of the time. Manet did not hide it away. He showed the painting in the window of a shop on the Boulevard des Capucines, one of the main streets of Paris, and because of his fame it gathered attention and crowds. His model was Henriette Hauser, a well-known courtesan of the era, and the name Nana probably came from Zola's novel L'Assommoir, where a character of that name first appears.

What to look for

A young, beautiful woman stands before a mirror with two extinguished candles, her face turned to the viewer. She is only half dressed, in a white chemise, a blue corset, silk stockings and high-heeled shoes. The room suggests a boudoir. Behind her is a sofa with two pillows, and on the right, cut off by the edge of the canvas, sits an elegantly dressed man, only partly visible. On the left are a chair, a table and a flowerpot. Notice how calmly she meets our eyes while the man waits at the margin.

Meaning and intent

Both the title and the many details suggest a high-class prostitute and her client. In the second half of the nineteenth century Nana was a popular assumed name for prostitutes, and even today the French word nana can describe a frivolous woman, or simply a woman in slang. French society was not ready for such a frank image of prostitution. According to the source, critics did not see the artistic qualities of the work and focused only on the scene it showed, which is why the Salon turned it away.

Legacy

Among Manet's defenders was Emile Zola, who in 1880 published a novel called Nana, the ninth volume of his Rougon-Macquart series. The shared title is striking, but there is no clear evidence that painter and writer inspired each other, since the book appeared three years after the picture; Manet more likely took the name from L'Assommoir. The painting, about 154 by 115 cm, is now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany, where the woman at her mirror still turns to face whoever comes to look.