The Portrait of Mademoiselle Claus was an early version of Manet’s more famous work The Balcony where Mademoiselle Claus is pictured with Berthe Morisot and Antoine Guillemet. The unfinished, earlier version was painted in 1868. Shortly after Manet’s death, it was purchased by John Singer Sargent in 1884. It has only been publicly shown once in the last 100 years at the National Gallery during a retrospective of the artist’s works on the 100th anniversary of his death.