Fully dressed, buttoned up and looking quite prim, this woman still managed to cause a stir. The reason: the art world knew exactly who she was. She was the model from Manet's scandalous nudes.
What you're looking at
Édouard Manet painted this in 1866. His model, Victorine Meurent, stands in a long pink silk dressing gown, holding a small bunch of violets. A gray parrot perches beside her. In the foreground at right lies a half-peeled orange, and she fingers a man's monocle. Only a glimpse of her foot peeks out from under all that silk.
The model everyone recognized
A few years earlier, Meurent had posed nude for Manet's Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass, two startling pictures that scandalized the Paris art world. Here she looks demure, but Manet gave her a full-length canvas, a format normally reserved for state portraits. It was one more way of bending the rules.
A reply to Courbet
The Met says Manet seems to have painted it in response to Gustave Courbet's Woman with a Parrot, a voluptuous nude that Courbet showed at the Salon of 1866. Manet's version keeps the parrot but swaps the nude for graceful, buttoned-up elegance. When it hung in the Salon of 1868, critics eyed it as a rejoinder to Courbet, and some complained that Manet's “current vice” was failing to “value a head more than a slipper.” By 1878 an auction catalogue listed it as Femme au perroquet, “Woman with a Parrot.”
Five senses in one picture
Recent scholars read the painting as an allegory of the five senses. The violets stand for smell. The orange is taste. The parrot, a pet and a confidant, is hearing. The monocle stands for sight, and her finger and thumb barely touching it stand for touch.
A price that swung up and down
Manet sold it to the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in January 1872 for 1,500 francs. At an auction in 1878, it sold for just 700 francs. By 1881 it had reached the New York collector Erwin Davis, who gave it to the Metropolitan Museum in 1889, only six years after Manet's death. The Met says it was the first museum in the world to collect Manet's work.