KEITH CHRISTIANSEN: In the early 1860s, Edouard Manet scandalized the Paris art world with his canvases of provocative nudes. While this woman is fully clothed, and looks to us quite prim, the artist still managed to subvert convention. Curator Susan Stein explains:

SUSAN STEIN: He's using a full-length format, normally reserved for state portraits, for his model, Victorine Meurent, known to the art world from the startling pictures Manet had painted three years earlier, where she posed nude for “Luncheon on the Grass” and “Olympia.” He seems to have painted this work in response to Courbet's Woman with a Parrot, on view in the next gallery and seen through the doorway at right. In utter contrast to the explicit sensuality of Courbet's voluptuous nude, Manet's Woman with a Parrot is the epitome of graceful buttoned up elegance. The image is suggestive to be sure, as she fingers a man's monocle in coy detachment with just a glimpse of her foot peeking out from beneath the yards of her pink silk dressing gown. Manet allows the sensuality of the work to be carried by rich passages of paint, the creamy pinks and whites of the figure enlivened by blacks and the daring clash of oranges and acid yellows and such telling details as her intimate attire, pet parrot as confidant, not to mention the half-peeled orange in the foreground at right. Variously interpreted, the painting may be seen as an allegory of the five senses -- hearing, the parrot; taste, the orange; touch, the woman's finger and thumb, which just touch; smell, the bouquet of violets; and sight, the monocle.

KEITH CHRISTIANSEN: The Met was the first museum in the world to collect Manet’s daring work. It received this painting and his “Boy with a Sword” as gifts in 1889. That’s just six years after the artist's death.