Les photos de Victorine Meurent qui ont servi de modèle au « Déjeuner sur l’herbe » retrouvées par hasard à Grenoble
A chance discovery at the Musée de Grenoble has unearthed two previously unknown photographs of Victorine Meurent, the favorite model of Édouard Manet, taken by Gaudenzio Marconi in 1863. Art historian Laure Boyer, while researching a different subject, recognized Meurent in the images and realized they directly served as studies for Manet's iconic paintings *Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe* and *Olympia*. The photographs show Meurent in poses nearly identical to the figures in both works, with only the orientation reversed in one case and facial expressions swapped between the two paintings.
The finding is significant because it provides concrete visual evidence of Manet's working method, confirming that he commissioned photographs of models to continue painting outside studio sessions, as Delacroix and Courbet had done. It also reframes Victorine Meurent's role from a passive model to an active influence on Manet's revolutionary modernism, and highlights her own overlooked career as a painter. The discovery raises new questions about how the photographs ended up in the Fantin-Latour archive at the museum, with Boyer suggesting Manet's fellow painter may have taken them after Manet's death to protect his reputation.