Nana

Nana is an oil painting by Édouard Manet, dated 1877, now held by the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. It shows a young woman at her dressing table, half-dressed, powdering and applying make-up in front of a mirror while a man in evening dress sits on a sofa behind her. The model was the actress Henriette Hauser, nicknamed "Citron", who was then the mistress of the Dutch prince William of Orange-Nassau, who had been stranded in Paris. Manet began the picture in autumn 1876 and finished it over the winter, adding the male figure in January 1877.

The composition is held together by the horizontal lines of the wallpaper and furniture, set against the vertical of the mirror stand and the female figure. The woman is seen in profile, yet she turns her head toward the viewer with a calm, slightly smiling expression, while the gentleman looks away beyond the frame. The details are carefully rendered: the blue corset, the white tulle petticoats, the embroidered stockings, the powder puff and the rouge stick in her hands. The mood is relaxed and domestic, closer to the playful elegance of eighteenth-century painting than to the harshness of Zola's novel, to which the title refers.

Several symbolic details have been read as comments on the relationship: the man's cane, with its phallic shape, the ibis on the wallpaper, a bird the Bible considers unclean, and the unlit candles, which may suggest self-interest rather than passion. The title was already set when Manet submitted the work to the Paris Salon of 1877, but the jury rejected it as offensive to public morals. He then displayed it in the window of the Giroux gallery, where it drew large crowds as well as harsh criticism.

The painting is closely linked to Before the Mirror, completed a year earlier, which probably shows the same woman from behind, though executed in a far looser, sketchier manner. Its significance lies in the frankness with which it presents a woman of the demimonde without idealizing her, something Parisian audiences found hard to accept.

Painter

Édouard Manet

Date

1877

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

154 × 115 cm

Museum

Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Genre

portrait

Depicts

cushion, couch, sideboard, wallpaper, ibis, mirror, woman, man

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