Description
Year of creation: 1860s
Original size: 74.9 cm x 100 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. 2008.277)
Young Woman with Ibis – Edgar Degas
A young woman stands by a stone parapet, turned almost into profile to her right, her dark chestnut hair pinned back. A blue-green wrap covers her shoulders and falls to the ground. Our hand painted version keeps that oddly quiet encounter.
Hands and birds
With her right hand she holds the wrap at her breast; the left rests on the parapet. Beside her hand stands a scarlet ibis with its curved beak lowered, and another to her right raises its wings and opens its beak. She does not look at them and is not afraid of them; the birds are simply there, as though part of the parapet.
A city in the distance
Behind, a city lies pale on the horizon under an apricot sky. At the lower right pink and white flowers hang beside dark stone. The scene is set in no particular place: the horizon is too general, the sky too flat, and that indefiniteness is what gives the picture its strangeness.
Colour set as contrast
The colour is set as an opposition: the scarlet of the birds, the blue-green cloth, the warm flat sky. None of these areas describes a material – each is first a colour and only then a thing. The same early Degas still searching for the large composition stands behind the Spartan subject; where that search arrived is shown by the dancers at the barre.
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.
