Ellen Andrée
Ellen Andrée was a French model for Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir and other impressionists, in the 1870s.Life
Andrée was born in 1857 in Paris and lived in the Rue du Rocher. She started working as a model, and has become notable because she appeared in a number of important impressionist paintings. She became an actress in the Naturalist style of theatre, in which the purpose was to give a near perfect view of real scenes and not to rely on the audience's imagination. She worked in that profession for several decades, appearing in plays and comedies such as those by Sacha Guitry and Georges Courteline, but it was the brief period in the 1870s, when she was a model for a number of artists, most importantly Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, that made her name. In 1878 she was the model for Rolla, a painting by Henri Gervex, that was based on a poem by Alfred de Musset.
