Baudelaire's Mistress (Portrait of Jeanne Duval)

A painted portrait attests to long minutes, stretching into longer hours, spent studying an individual’s features and dress. Even the language used to describe the process, “capturing a likeness,” implies something taken and, by extension, something given up. Yet despite the inevitable intimacy of the process, many portraits feel opaque—an apparently accurate transcription...

IN LES COMPLEXES FAMILIAUX, which Lacan wrote as an encyclopedia article, he describes the act of desiring as an act of identification with one who already has the desire and suggests that in the process of this identification, the original...

~In late 1862, Édouard Manet (1832–1883) noted in his studio carnet that a model he described as “Laure, très belle négresse” (“Laure, very beautiful black woman”) sat for a portrait in his rue...

~In 1932, on the occasion of the centenary of Manet’s birth and his retrospective at the Orangerie, Paul Valéry wrote the following about one of the several portraits of his aunt Berthe Morisot done by Manet between 1868 and 1874 (fig. 75):