When Édouard Manet exhibited Olympia in the Salon of 1865, it unleashed a firestorm. Viewers were shocked by the subject matter — the sheer nakedness of the sitter — and by his formal treatment of the subject: critics lamented the lack of finish, the sharp contrast between light and dark, and, above all, the starkness of the model’s outward look at the viewer. For critics at the time, Manet’s shocking way with form went hand in hand with a sense of moral outrage, around gender and class. Olympia subtly but powerfully broke all the unspoken rules about the nude in painting and set the standard for a new form of revolutionary modern art.

Olympia has been subject to countless interpretations for over a century, but one subject has seemingly eluded critical commentary: race. If the white model Victorine Meurent has been at the center of many interpretations, what about the other, equally central character, the model’s black maid, Laure (we don’t know her last name). It wasn’t the fact of a black woman serving a white woman that produced any scandal, but how Manet painted that relation (much of it focused on the way the flowers seemed to displace the white model’s genitalia). Things are different now; we want to know more about how artists engage race. But if you look at the art-historical record, Laure is nowhere to be found — until recently.

In 1999, art historian T. J. Clark, author of the most influential account of Olympia, looked back in horror at what he missed in the painting: “For God’s sake! You’ve written about the white woman on the bed for fifty pages and more, and hardly mentioned the black woman alongside her!” Indeed, Laure’s critical fortunes have dramatically changed over the past few years. “Olympia’s maid” has become one of the privileged sites for the discussion of race in art history.