Although originally overlooked, the figure of the maid in the painting, modelled by a woman named Laure, has become a topic of discussion among contemporary scholars. As T. J. Clark recounts of a friend's disbelief in the revised 1990 version of "The Painting of Modern Life": "you've written about the white woman on the bed for fifty pages and more, and hardly mentioned the black woman alongside her." "Olympia" was created 15 years after slavery had been abolished in France and its empire, but negative stereotypes of black people persisted among some elements of French society. In some cases, the white prostitute in the painting was described using racially charged language. According to Maria Rutledge, "references to Blackness thus invaded the image of white Olympia, turning her into the caricatural and grotesque animal that Black people are frequently made to represent in the nineteenth century."