Nana

Painted in 1877 and now at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Nana depicts a young actress or courtesan in her boudoir, adjusting her appearance while a top-hatted admirer waits on the right. The title invokes Zola's novel about a Parisian courtesan (published 1880, but the character appeared earlier in L'Assommoir, 1877), situating Manet's painting firmly in the literary and social discourse about Parisian demi-monde life. The Salon refused the painting; Manet exhibited it in a shop window on the Boulevard des Capucines where it attracted enormous crowds. The Hamburg Kunsthalle also holds Portrait of Faure as Hamlet, making it an important Manet holding outside France.

Nana's figure in a blue chemise and white petticoat dominates the canvas, her gaze directed at the viewer rather than the mirror before her — the same complicit directness of Olympia applied to a more intimate domestic setting. The pale blue of her garment is rendered with confident, fresh brushwork. The seated admirer in black is relegated to the composition's edge, his presence registering as social context rather than psychological equal.