Description
Year of creation: 1865
Original size: 92.7 cm x 73.7 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. 29.100.128)
A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers – Edgar Degas
The middle of the canvas is taken by an enormous bunch of asters and chrysanthemums in a greenish earthenware vase. The flowers are white, red, yellow and violet, packed so densely that the leaves are barely visible. Our hand-painted canvas painting keeps exactly that balance of power between the flowers and the person.
A bouquet larger than the sitter
The bunch is larger than the woman beside it and stands precisely where a portrait would put the head. That substitution is the move that makes the picture read as portrait and still life at once, without fully being either. The flowers are not the decoration of the scene; the flowers are the scene.
The woman at the right edge
She sits right at the edge on the right, an elbow resting on the table, a gloved hand pressed to her mouth. She wears a white lace cap with a dark ribbon, a sand-brown dress, and a dark shawl falling across her shoulders. Her look escapes past the viewer to the right, out of the canvas.
Table, wallpaper, and a name left open
On the table stand a glass jug, a crumpled brown paper beside it, and a green cloth with reddish stripes; at the left is a flowered wallpaper, at the upper right a window with greenery, and at the lower left the date and the signature. The Metropolitan Museum of Art gives the sitter’s name in its title with a question mark, so it does not confirm her. Portraits where the sitter is known carry Mademoiselle Marie Dihau and Mademoiselle Dihau at the Piano. The canvas measures 92.7 x 73.7 cm.
Our version
Our version is a hand-painted oil painting on canvas. Every canvas is painted individually, in the size and frame you choose. The painter works from the original with brush and oils, so the strokes and the layering stay visible – the part a print cannot reproduce.
