The Promenade (Madame Gamby)

The woman wears a black hat decorated with purple flowers, and her fringe is worn down in the fashion of the day. The black dress is painted with thinned paint, and the form of the body is expressed while leaving the brush marks visible. The green of the garden behind is painted with light brushwork like that of the Impressionists.

Black was a color the Impressionist painters rarely used, but Edouard Manet liked to use it. The picture is built from large planes of green and black, and within them the white face, yellow gloves, red lips and small red flowers catch the eye. It could be called less a portrait of an individual woman than a painting of the beauty of Parisian women.

In 1880, having fallen ill, Manet rented a house in Bellevue, on the outskirts of Paris, to recuperate. That summer, when friends came to visit, he painted about thirty oil paintings, including figures, landscapes and still lifes, and this work is one of them. The model, Madame Gamby, is said to have been one of those who visited Manet there.

After Manet's death, this work was bought by the singer Jean-Baptiste Faure at the sale of his estate in 1884. It then passed through the hands of the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel, the American collector Paul Mellon and others, before entering the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum.