1865, Edgar Degas, A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers (Madame Paul Valpincon?) -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)
From the museum label: Degas painted this work in the fall of 1865, after the Salon that presented his Scene of War in the Middle Ages and Manet's Olympia. The remarkable composition destabilizes traditional categories of painting: it is neither a grand still life of flowers nor a portrait. The sitter is probably the wife of the artist's schoolboy friend Paul Valpinçon, whose country house Degas immensely enjoyed visiting.
1865, Edgar Degas, A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers (Madame Paul Valpincon?) -- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)
From the museum label: Degas painted this work in the fall of 1865, after the Salon that presented his Scene of War in the Middle Ages and Manet's Olympia. The remarkable composition destabilizes traditional categories of painting: it is neither a grand still life of flowers nor a portrait. The sitter is probably the wife of the artist's schoolboy friend Paul Valpinçon, whose country house Degas immensely enjoyed visiting.