Laure

Laure was an art model in France known for her work with artist Édouard Manet. She is best known for posing as the black maid offering the white nude figure a bouquet of flowers in Manet's 1863 painting Olympia. Biography Little is known about Laure. She has been described as African or Caribbean and her last name is unknown. Art historian Griselda Pollock suggested that she met the artist Édouard Manet while working as a nursemaid in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. Another theory suggests that Jeanne Duval, who was in a relationship with Manet's friend Charles Baudelaire, introduced Manet and Laure. This theory was discussed by Pollock, as well as by Manet archivist Achille Tabarant. Manet's notebook, included in the 2019 exhibition Le Modèle noir, de Géricault à Matisse at the musee d'Orsay in Paris, recorded her address at 11, rue de Vintimille, 3rd floor, in Paris. This was less than a ten-minute walk from Manet's apartment in a neighborhood inhabited by avant-garde artists and writers, as well as a "small but highly visible" black population. This residence was close to Duval, who Baudelaire wrote to at 17 rue Sauffroy. Art modeling