Young Lady in 1866

Painted in 1866 and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Young Lady in 1866 (also called Woman with a Parrot) deliberately provoked comparison with Courbet's Woman with a Parrot of the same year, exhibiting the same year at the Salon. Manet's version — a woman in a pale grey dressing gown holding a parrot perch — is more enigmatic and psychological than Courbet's sensual reclining nude. The title's explicit date situates the work in the current moment rather than a timeless classical or exotic context — it is emphatically about 1866 Paris. The woman's direct gaze and the slightly ambiguous social context carry the characteristic Manet charge of unresolved meaning.

The woman's pale grey dressing gown is one of Manet's most remarkable passages of tonal painting — the grey described through subtle variations of warm and cool tone, the fabric's soft weight conveyed without elaborate rendering. The violet of her half-held orange provides the single warm chromatic note. The parrot adds a vertical element to the composition. The figure stands against a neutral background that throws her pale form forward.