Jeune Femme en rose

Jeune Femme en Rose belongs to the series of pastel and oil portraits of fashionable women that occupied much of Manet's later career, as growing arthritis made large-scale figure painting increasingly difficult. The model, dressed in a pink gown, participates in what was effectively Manet's salon practice — intimate portraits of society women executed with the same bravura as his major canvases. The pink gown, carefully differentiated from flesh tones, shows the colour sensitivity he maintained to the end of his working life.

Manet restricts the palette to a dialogue between the pink gown and the warm ivory of the sitter's skin and the neutral grey of the background. The paint is applied in the direct, non-reworked manner of his mature style — a single pass of loaded brush defines the fold of fabric or the curve of the cheek without subsequent correction.