Young Woman with Ibis

Degas painted this portrait in 1857 and 1858, then reworked it between 1860 and 1862. He was in his mid-twenties, just back from three years of study in Italy, and he was painting portraits of family members and close friends. This is one of the strangest of those early portraits. A young woman stands in a room, her body turned slightly to the left, her face in profile. She wears a white dress with a black shawl over her shoulders. Her left hand rests on the back of a chair. Behind her, two ibises stand on the floor, one at the lower left and one at the lower right. The birds are painted in careful detail, their long curved beaks and white plumage precisely rendered. The room is otherwise bare, with a dark wall and a strip of sky visible through a window at the upper right. The woman has never been conclusively identified. She may be a relative of Degas, possibly his cousin Laura, who appears in other paintings from this period. The ibises are even harder to explain. Degas may have seen them at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, which kept a collection of exotic birds. He may have been thinking of Egyptian iconography, where the ibis was sacred to Thoth, the god of wisdom. Or he may simply have liked the way they looked, their long curved forms echoing the curve of the woman's profile. Degas was 23 when he started this painting. He had just returned from Italy, where he had spent three years copying the Old Masters in Rome, Florence, and Naples. His early work is heavily influenced by Ingres, whose clean lines and cool palette he admired. This portrait shows that influence clearly: the precise drawing, the smooth surface, the restrained color. The ibises, with their obsessive detail, are a youthful eccentricity that he would never repeat. Oil on canvas, 100 by 75 centimeters, roughly 39 by 30 inches. Degas reworked the painting several years after he started it, scraping down the original surface and repainting the background. The X-ray reveals that the ibises were added in the second campaign, replacing something else in the lower portion of the canvas. The paint surface is smooth, with thin layers and careful blending in the flesh tones. The vertical format and muted palette make this print work well in a study, bedroom, or hallway. The strange subject rewards repeated viewing. A white frame picks up the woman's dress and the ibises' plumage. The 12x16 or 16x20 size gives the birds and the profile enough detail to appreciate up close. The painting is in the Met's H. O. Havemeyer Collection, bequeathed in 1929. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.