Portrait of Marguerite Gauthier-Lathuille

This 1878 portrait of Marguerite Gauthier-Lathuille from the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon was painted the same year as Manet's celebrated 'Chez le Père Lathuille,' a garden restaurant scene also featuring members of the Lathuille family. The portrait is relatively straightforward compared to Manet's more experimental works of the period, yet it shows his characteristic directness of observation and his ability to render the social type of the fashionable young Parisian woman without sentimentality. The Lyon museum holds an important collection of Manet's work, and this portrait represents his continued engagement with portraiture as a vehicle for recording modern Parisian social identity.

The portrait uses Manet's assured late oil technique with direct, economical brushwork. The face is rendered with careful attention to skin tone and expression, while the background and costume are handled more freely. His typical high tonal contrast between light and dark areas structures the composition simply but effectively.