Here Manet uses the same model, Victorine Meurent, as in Olympia (Musée du Louvre, R.F. 644), Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (Musée du Louvre, R.F. 1668), Mademoiselle Victorine in the Costume of an Espada (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 29.100.53), and other works of the sixties and seventies. Manet never stereotyped her but always adapted Victorine's appearance for the purposes of a particular painting. Victorine also posed for Alfred Stevens, and Jean Sutherland Boggs speculates that Degas used her for his Young Girl in a Red Peignoir in the Chester Dale Collection, New York (see Jean Sutherland Boggs, Portraits by Degas, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962, p. 33). She became a painter herself and exhibited a self- portrait in the Salon of 1876. The sad end of her life purportedly inspired the character La Glue in "The End of Marie Pellegrin" in George Moore's Memoir's of My Dead Life.

Woman with a Parrot was painted in Manet's studio on the Rue Guyot and completed in the year following the appearance of Olympia in the Salon of 1865. According to Tabarant, it was first exhibited privately in the painter's studio (see A. Tabarant, Manet et ses –uvres, Paris, 1947, p. 124). In the spring of 1867 when Manet was not invited to participate in the international exposition on the Champ de Mars, he followed Courbet's solution to a similar situation in 1855; Manet decided to erect a viewing space for fifty of his own works (including Woman with a Parrot) on the Place de l'Alma, nearby the official exhibition. He probably would not have ventured so bold a step had he not been encouraged by a series of articles by Zola in l'Evénement, one of which was devoted solely to Manet.

Within the history of Impressionism and the rise of modernism, Woman with a Parrot has double importance. First, the painting is significant in its reduction of pictorial elements; the picture consists mainly of two broad areas, the light area of Victorine and the dark area of the rest. Second, the horizontal of the floor plane merges imperceptibly with the vertical of the back- ground. The result is to flatten the picture space, bringing Victorine and the parrot closer to the picture plane. Manet's primary concerns are as much with the pictorial elements per se as with the subject. In a review of the Salon of 1868 Théophile Thoré succinctly analyzed Manet's interests : "Manet sees color and light, after which he no longer worries about the rest. When he has made the 'spot of color' on his canvas that a person or an object makes on the surrounding environment, he feels that this is sufficient. Don't ask anything else of him for the moment. He will doubtless work things out for himself later, when he thinks of giving the essential parts of beings their relative values. His present vice is a sort of pantheism in which a head is esteemed no more than a slipper; in which sometimes more importance is given to a bouquet of flowers than to the physiognomy of a woman..." (Théophile Thoré - Burger], as quoted in Linda Nochlin, Realism and Tradition, Englewood Cliffs, 1966, p. 69). Toward the end of the same article Thoré's criticism is more direct : "...the portrait of a young woman in a pink dress, standing next to a beautiful grey parrot, roosting on its perch. The soft pink dress harmonizes delightfully with a delicate pearl-colored background. Pink and grey and a little touch of lemon at the base of the perch: that is all. One scarcely pays attention to the head, although it is full face and in the same light as the pink material. It is lost in the modulation of the coloring." Zola, too, had taken a formalist approach in the articles in l'Evénement and La Revue du XI Xe si?cle, but his tone was purely lauda- tory and expressed none of Thoré's reservations.

In an article recently published in the Metropolitan Museum Journal (Volume 7 [1973], p. 115-122) Mona Hadler places Woman with a Parrot in a long art historical and iconographic tradition : "...one can speculate that Victorine's monocle is actually a man's monocle. Accordingly the flowers would also be a gift from a man as they were in the Olympia... we are provided with the ambience and the clues to the romantic nature of the shared secrets behind the knowing stare of Victorine and her gray confidant. In accordance with the traditional iconography Victorine's parrot is her intimate companion, sees her in the process of dressing, and appears to share the secrets of her personal life" (Hadler, p. 122). Furthermore, Hadler notes that a seventeenth-century Dutch pain- ting by Frans van Mieris, treating the same subject, was" ...illustrated in Charles Blanc's Histoire des Peintres a book consulted frequently by Manet in the 1860" (Hadler, p. 118).

Charles Sterling and Margaretta Salinger indicate that "the violent attacks that this attractive and inoffensive painting pro- voked seemed to have resulted from the presence of the parrot, which recalled to the indignant public Courbet's Woman with a Parrot [Metropolitan Museum of Art, 29.100.571, a picture that had caused a scandal at the Salon two years before" (Charles Sterling and Margaretta Salinger, French Paintings, A Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Volume III, [New York], 1967, p. 40; for the Courbet, see Volume II, p. 124). George Heard Hamilton provides further insight into the possible rela- tionship between the Courbet and the Manet : "In 1866 Courbet had shown at the Salon a large canvas of a reclining nude woman holding a parrot in one hand (New York, Metropolitan Museum). The elaborate pose and artificial gesture were Courbet's answer to the criticism directed against himself, and in a roundabout way, a reply to Manet's challenge in Olympia. Courbet's complicated design, sober color scheme, and dense modeling were the anti- theses of Manet's clear scale of values and flat pattern. To the public of 1868 it appeared that Manet was offering another rebuttal to Courbet; Courbet's lady had donned her wrapper! That the problem was rather one of discovering subjects in modern life, and a treatment appropriate to them, went unobserved" (George Heard Hamilton, Manet and his Critics, New York, 1969, p. 115).

Signed, lower left : Manet

Provenance:

Durand-Ruel, Paris (bought for 1500 francs in 1871-72);

Ernest Hoschedé, Paris (bought from Durand-Ruel for 2500 francs; sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, June 6, 1878, no. 44, 700 francs to Hecht);

Albert Hecht, Paris (from 1878);

Durand-Ruel, Paris (1881);

Erwin Davis, New York (1881-1889); sale, New York, Ortgies, March 19-20, 1889, no. 99, as Feeding the Parrot, bought in for $1350).

Gift of Erwin Davis, 1889.