Dutch-French pianist, piano teacher, muse, model and spouse of the painter Édouard Manet.
Suzanne grew up in the medieval city Zaltbommel. Her father, Carolus Antonius Leenhoff (1807-1878), was the carillon player of the “Gasthuistoren” (guest house tower). Her brother Ferdinand Leenhoff (1841-1914) became a sculptor. He was portrayed by Édouard Manet as the left man on his now famous painting “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe” (1863). The other male between the “not functional” nudes of the scandalous painting was Édouard Manets brother Ferdinand.
The remarkable story goes that end 1842 the pianist Frans Liszt travelled from Weimar to Den Haag to play for the Dutch Royal family. When his ship on the river the Waal passed Zaltbommel, he heard wonderful church bells play and decided to halt to visit the carillon player in his tower. Carolus Leenhoff invited List to his home where his daughter Suzanne played for him. List was impressed by her talent and advised the parents to let her study in Paris.
But it not their daughters career, but the potato disease “phytophthora” (1845-49) that forced the mother and her five children to emigrate to Paris (1847). Here they stayed with Suzannes grandmother, who lived from a small soldier pension. Suzanne became one of the twenty thousand piano teachers in Paris.
Suzanne Leenhoff first met the Manets, when she was hired in to give piano lessons to the 17-year-old Édouard and his 16-year-old brother Eugène. The Manets were a rich, upper-middle-class Parisian family, the father Auguste being a high court Judge. Auguste Manet (1767-1862) wanted a decent career for his son Édouard, military or Law, but certainly not that of an artist. And when Édouard and Suzanne started a love affair, they kept it secret for the old man. Only after his death, Édouard dared to marry her in Zaltbommel.
In 1851 Suzanne Leenhoff became pregnant. Her beloved son Léon-Edouard Koëlla-Leenhoff has been painted a lot by Manet, but it was a mystery who was the father. Both Édouard and his father Auguste have been mentioned. But according to recent research by the historian Thera Coppens, it was one of the four Koëlla brothers, Dutch musicians that lived in Paris. Édouard adopted Léon as his godchild, but Suzanne’ mother adopted him as her child. Obviously, to not discredit the good names of the Manet family and her daughter, she relied on.
She died 8 March 1906 in Paris. She and Manet had no legal children. During the second part of his life Manet suffered from locomotor ataxia, excruciating limb and chest pains, which were caused by syphilis.

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