Olympia

Édouard Manet

Oil on canvas

Musée d'Orsay

Olympia depicts a nude woman reclining on a luxurious bed, meeting the viewer's gaze with a bold, unapologetic stare, while a Black maidservant presents her with a bouquet of flowers and a black cat arches at her feet — every detail deliberately coded to signal her identity as a contemporary Parisian courtesan. Painted in a strikingly flat, modern style that stripped away the soft chiaroscuro and mythological pretense of academic nudes, Manet drew direct inspiration from Titian's Venus of Urbino yet transformed it into something shockingly real and immediate. Born in Paris in 1832, Édouard Manet was a central figure of the avant-garde who bridged Realism and Impressionism, championing unflinching honesty over idealized convention. Hanging this iconic masterpiece in your home means living with one of the most consequential images in Western art history — a work that single-handedly redefined what painting could say about modern life, power, and the gaze.