Archive Find: A New Photograph of Jeanne Duval

Sketches of Jeanne Duval from the notebook of Charles Baudelaire.

In the process of searching for the identity of one of Édouard Manet's favorite models, a Black woman known as "Laure" who appears in Olympia, I often found myself stumbling over mentions of another famous Black model from the 19th century art world, Jeanne Duval. 

She was the lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, but like so many marginal women from that time, little was now known about her for certain. I had a lot of success finding previously unrecognized photographs and biographical information for the forgotten women in my upcoming book The Parisian Sphinx, and I wondered if applying some of those research methods to Jeanne Duval might yield interesting results. 

One day while searching through the big boxes of 19th century photo archives at the Richelieu branch of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, I found something…

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