Julie Manet

 Born on this day in 1878 was Julie Manet, daughter of Eugène Manet (brother of the more famous Edouard) and the painter Berthe Morisot. Sadly both her parents died when she was in her teens, leaving her an orphan at 16. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé became her guardian, and she received support from friends, including Renoir, and family. At 21 she married the painter and art collector Ernest Rouart, in a double ceremony in which one of her cousins married the poet Paul Valéry. Julie lived into the 1960s, dying at the age of 87. Her teenage diaries, published in English as Growing Up with the Impressionists, are said to give a notably vivid and spontaneous account of life among all those artists and poets, including records of lively conversations about the Dreyfus affair. I must keep an eye open for it...
  The young Julie was strikingly pretty, and of course much painted, especially by her mother and Renoir. The sketch above, showing her sitting on a watering can, is by her uncle Edouard.