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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...

ÉDOUARD MANET GREW up on the rue des Petits-Augustins (now the rue Bonaparte), more or less across the street from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts he never attended. The address was a short walk down the quay and across the bridge from the Palais de Justice where Manet’s father worked; indeed, many judges and magistrates lived nearby. As a family of a certain social standing,...

~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):