Title: Madame Brunet

Artist: Édouard Manet

Portrait of Madame Brunet About 1861–63, reworked by 1867 Édouard Manet French, Paris 1832–Paris 1883 Oil on canvas 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 World's Fair that year.