Young Woman with Ibis

When Degas first drew this composition, in a Roman notebook in 1857, it was just a young woman lost in thought, with nothing exotic about her. He was in his early twenties then, with years of copying the old masters in Italy still ahead of him, and decades before the ballet dancers that would make his name. The strangeness came later. Around 1860 he went back into the canvas and added the things that stop you now: a hazy Middle Eastern city behind her, sprays of pink flowers, and two red ibises perched at her side. That taste for the East ran all through French painting in these years, and Degas, usually so cool and controlled, borrowed it for this one picture. Notice how little the woman herself changed. Her pose and her faraway look still belong to that first quiet sketch. The birds and the distant towers were painted in around a portrait that was already finished.