Jeanne de Marsy

Jeanne de Marsy (1865-1937) was a successful and popular actress in Paris during the 1880s and 1890s. However, it is on her role as a model for Manet and Renoir that her fame rests. In 1881 she sat for Manet as his model for a painting entitled Spring, acquired by the Getty in 2014, and she appears again as one of the figures standing in the background of his famous A Bar at the Folies-Bergères (1882), now in the Courtauld in London. She was also the subject of Renoir's Portrait of Mlle de Marsy, painted in 1882 and now in a private collection.

Her real name was Anne Darlaud, and she was born in 1865, the daughter of a book-binder and a brocade maker. Her elder sister Eugénie-Marie was also an artist's model and actress. The gossip columnists of the time remarked on how both girls were able to take on powerful protectors, while simultaneously retaining their elegant lovers. When Eugénie-Marie died in 1914, she left half a million francs to Jeanne.

Photographed by Chalot of Paris.