During the late 1870s, Edouard Manet began to experience health problems that made it difficult for him to work in oil painting. Instead, he began to draw using pastel, a powdery medium that allowed him to render line and color with each stroke. This work is one of numerous portraits that Manet created around this time with the medium. It depicts Claire Campbell, a fashionable young British woman whose father published The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper. Manet used the velvety texture of pastel to render the subject's skin and hair, limiting his palette to mostly neutral tones such as white, gray, and black.