Portrait of a Young Woman

Degas's Portrait of a Young Woman of 1885, held at the Metropolitan Museum, shows an unidentified sitter in an interior setting that provides little context beyond the implicit social respectability of a well-dressed bourgeois subject. The work belongs to the period of his most sustained portraiture output in the early-to-mid 1880s, when his growing eye problems were beginning to affect his working habits. The lack of an identified sitter may reflect either a professional commission or an informal study; in either case the emotional temperature — the slight avoidance of direct engagement — typifies Degas's tendency to depict subjects in private psychological space even in formal portrait contexts.

The handling of the sitter's dark dress and neutral background creates a restricted tonal range that focuses all the picture's colour energy on the face and the small areas of lace and accessory detail. Degas's characteristic use of absorbent grounds in certain oil passages gives the complexion a matte, powdery quality reminiscent of his pastel work.