Edouard Manet - Lady with Fans Button

Lady with Fans / Portrait of Nina de Callias (La Dame aux éventails), painted by Édouard Manet in 1873 in oil on canvas, portrays Nina de Callias, a pianist, composer and celebrated hostess of one of Paris’s most brilliant literary and artistic salons. Reclining nonchalantly on a sofa, she wears one of the “Algerian” costumes she liked to wear when receiving guests and looks directly at the viewer with an expression mixing amusement, curiosity and a hint of melancholy. Japanese fans pinned across the wall behind her create a richly decorative setting, while the composition closes a long series of reclining “women on a sofa” that occupied Manet for years. He kept the work in his studio and never exhibited it during his lifetime; it was first shown publicly in the 1884 retrospective held after his death.