Joven dama en 1866

The model here is Victorine Meurent, and three years earlier she had caused a scandal for Manet. She is the cool, naked stare of Olympia and the woman at the picnic in Luncheon on the Grass, both of which outraged Paris. Here in 1866 he paints her fully dressed, in a long pink dressing gown, standing at full length in the tall format usually kept for portraits of royalty. She holds a small bunch of violets and idly fingers a man's monocle, a grey parrot perched beside her. Manet seems to have meant it as a reply to Courbet, whose own Woman with a Parrot, a lush reclining nude, was drawing crowds at the Salon that year. Manet answered with a woman standing perfectly composed in yards of pink silk, one foot just showing beneath the hem.