Painted in 1863 by the renowned French artist Edouard Manet, Olympia features a nude woman leisurely reclining upon a chaise lounge with a small black cat at her feet and a black maidservant with a bouquet of flowers. The highly controversial composition caused quite a stir due to the daring look of the shamelessly naked women and was considered as vulgar, an insult to good taste and a great insult to the academic tradition.

During the 19th century, many paintings depicted nudity of a goddess or an exotic odalisque, while Manet’s Olympia features a high class French sex worker awaiting her client. The pose of the nude woman in Olympia is very similar to that of Titian's Venus of Urbino, as well as the provocative directness of the Naked Maja, by Goya.

However, in depicting Olympia, the reclining nude woman with a sleeping dog at her feet, Manet made no attempt to present the nude woman as a figure of Venus. Instead, he depicted her as he saw her, while casting her in the role of a Parisian prostitute. In fact, during 1860s, the name Olympia was associated with sex workers in Paris. She is shown as receiving flowers from one of her clients, but does not seem to be interested in them. She is looking directly at the direction of the door, which implies that she is more interested about the next prospective visitor. However, her expression is not one of invitation, it rather reflects cool indifference, as the situation is not new to her and she is familiar with it, which is a part of her daily life. Her left hand is casually placed on her genitalia, which seems to be an intentional move to emphasize it, rather than to hide it, like the Venus of Urbino.

Her bracelet, orchid in hair, neck ribbon and a single slipper, everything serves to emphasize her nudity, while the presence of the black maid served as a powerful emblem of the ‘primitive’ sexuality and also tapped into the French colonialist mindset while providing a stark contrast to the whiteness of Olympia.

The black cat at the foot of the bed, with its yellow eyes staring outwards, is a traditional symbol for women, especially promiscuous women and probably symbolizes erotic pleasure as well as connoting evil and witchcraft.

Olympia was modeled by Victorine Meurent, an accomplished painter in her own right, who also worked as a model in Manet’s Lunch on the Grass and later became his wife, while art model Laure posed as the black maid. As a pioneer of Impressionism, Manet reworked the traditional theme of the female nude in Olympia, using a strong and uncompromising technique, based on the radical rejection of traditional academic routine and dared to suggest that the classical past held no relevance to the modern industrial world. Though it was painted in 1863, Manet did not exhibit this work until 1865, when it was accepted for the Salon and caused an outrage, both for the display of a sex worker and her confrontational gaze at the viewers, as well as the way of its depiction.

It was considered as vulgar, obscene and immoral. Though its modernity was defended by a small group of contemporary artists, with Emil Zola at their head, it was mocked and dubbed as the ‘Venus with a Cat’, ‘Odalisque with a yellow stomach’ and ‘Female Gorilla’.

Manet always maintained Olympia as his masterpiece and held the canvas with him, till his death. In fact, it shook the society, but made a huge impact on the upcoming generations of artists. Six years after Manet’s death, it was offered to the French Nation in 1889 by public subscription, initiated by Claude Monet. In 1890, it became part of the Luxembourg collection in 1890, before finally shifted to the Louvre in 1907.