She is best known for posing as the black maid offering the white nude figure a bouquet of flowers in Manet's 1863 painting Olympia.

Art historian Griselda Pollock suggested that she met the artist Édouard Manet while working as a nursemaid in the Tuileries Garden in Paris.

Manet's notebook, included in the 2019 exhibition Le Modèle noir, de Géricault à Matisse at the musee d'Orsay in Paris, recorded her address at 11, rue de Vintimille, 3rd floor, in Paris.Laure très belle négresse 11 rue de Vintimille 3eThis was less than a ten-minute walk from Manet's apartment in a neighborhood inhabited by avant-garde artists and writers, as well as a "small but highly visible" black population.

[2] In both Olympia and Children in the Tuileries Garden paintings, Laure is wearing the same outfit of a pink dress with a high white collar and a madras headtie.

Artists including Frédéric Bazille, Henri Matisse, and Romare Bearden quoted and referenced the Laure figure.

[9] This exhibit, curated by Denisse Murrell, placed Laure in the spotlight, which redefined and named black women in art.