Detail of A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers by Degas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 2023

Title: A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers (Madame Paul Valpinçon?)

Artist: Edgar Degas (French, Paris 1834–1917 Paris)

Date: 1865

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 29 x 36 1/2 in. (73.7 x 92.7 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929

Accession Number: 29.100.128


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.


Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436121