Museum Exhibition

Manet’s Bohémienne

Painting, Race, and Belonging in Nineteenth-Century France

Oil painting depicting a woman of color leaning against a black horse, with her head resting on her hand and a cigarette dangling from her lips. — Édouard Manet, *Bohémienne*, ca. 1878–80. Princeton University Art Museum. Bequest of Archibald S. Alexander, Class of 1928. Photo: Jeff Evans

Princeton University Art Museum

January 31–May 31, 2027

Manet’s Bohémienne explores the ways in which nineteenth-century French ideas of race and identity shaped the making and reception of one of Édouard Manet’s least-understood paintings, now a highlight of the Museum’s collections.

Found in his studio at his death, the painting shows a woman of color, a cigarette dangling from her lips, leaning against a horse. While Manet never titled or exhibited the painting during his lifetime, his stepson called it Bohémienne—the French word for a Roma woman, but also a term that avant-garde artists appropriated to refer to a creative life free from bourgeois social conventions. In the following years, the painting was given several competing titles, each of which assigned the woman a racial identity that signaled her status as an outsider to French society. Featuring Princeton’s painting in conversation with the work of such extraordinary French artists as Jacques Callot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, and Edgar Degas, this focused exhibition resituates the painting within Manet’s oeuvre and reconsiders its subject.