A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers (Madame Paul Valpinçon?), 1865
Oil on canvas
29 x 36 1/2 in. (73.7 x 92.7 cm)
H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100.128)
This painting presents us with an abundant bouquet of flowers juxtaposed with the portrait of a seated female figure. The flowers, which spill from their vase and gently nudge the upper portion of the woman's bent arm, her shoulder, and her cap, seem to have been picked from a garden in the country, which may be seen from the window behind. The bourgeois woman's gloves lie discarded on the opposite end of the table near a pitcher partially filled with water. The woman appears to be either lost in thought or staring at something beyond the confines of the picture frame.
The apparent simplicity of the scene, a woman leaning on a table near a vase of flowers, is deceiving. Formally as well as psychologically, the image is actually quite complex and enigmatic. The placement of the woman at the far right of the painting seems odd, as though she doesn't really belong in what would seem to be a still-life painting . If she were the subject of the work, wouldn't it make sense to place her somewhere closer to the center of the work, or at least have her facing the scene we are viewing? Because Degas has placed the image of the woman at the edge of the picture, cropped her figure so that her left arm is not shown, and directed her head and gaze so that she is facing and looking away from the vase of flowers, he must employ compositional devices in order to integrate these seemingly disparate elements.
Degas uses color and compositional devices to join the luxuriant still life with the portrait of a pensive woman. For example, the white of the flowers is echoed in the white lace on the woman's cap and in her earring, while the earth tones of the tablecloth appear in her dress and in the background. Degas also uses juxtapositions of vertical and horizontal lines and forms to anchor what is ostensibly a shallow pictorial space. The vertical lines in the window and its frame and the vertical figure of the seated woman are perpendicular to the back edge of the tabletop and the baseboard on the far left and link the two sides of the composition.
The overall composition of the work is asymmetrical. While the right side of the painting contains the table, the woman's form, and the window--one behind the other as though compressed together--the left side of the composition is open. We see the floor, the expanse of patterned wallpaper, and the flowers framed by the empty space around them. On the right, the flowers crowd against the woman's sleeve, whereas on the left they spring outward easily. The notion of an asymmetrical composition and the depiction of a compressed pictorial space were modern innovations. Édouard Manet, for example, often pictured a shallow pictorial space, and Paul Cézanne frequently used an asymmetrical arrangement to structure his paintings.
In A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers our eyes move in and out of the picture. They travel along the textured surface of flowers, down toward the woman's elbow, up to her face, out to where her eyes glance, back down to her hand resting in her lap. While the woman's eyes take us out of the picture, the weight of her elbow on the table draws us back in. While her cropped figure leaves us disoriented, the emergence of her left hand in the bottom right corner of the picture relocates us inside the painting.
The asymmetrical composition, the multiple focuses in the work, the conflation of still life and portrait, and the enigma of the woman's gaze--all contribute to a complex, intriguing work of art.
