Woman with a Parrot

Woman with a Parrot, also titled Woman Stroking a Parrot, is an 1827 oil on canvas by Eugène Delacroix, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. It shows a nude blonde woman reclining with her legs crossed on a blue sofa draped in pink fabric. With her left hand she strokes a parrot on the floor, while her right foot rests on a golden cushion. Yellow and orange curtains fall along the left side of the picture, and she wears a small wound headdress and bright necklaces, touches that reflect Delacroix's fascination with Orientalism.

The painting belongs to a turbulent personal period for the artist. Between 1825 and 1827, Delacroix went through what he seems to have experienced as a sentimental or sensual crisis, which produced many works with more or less erotic overtones. According to his private journal, the painting was made alongside intimate encounters with the model, before she left. Mademoiselle Laure, who also appears in The Death of Sardanapalus and Greece Among the Ruins of Missolonghi, has been suggested as the sitter, though Rose, another of his models, is also possible.

Several art historians have linked the composition to Lambert Sustris's Venus and Cupid, held in the Louvre. A preparatory drawing, smaller and limited to the outline of the figure, hangs close by in the same gallery. The work was given to the museum by Couturier de Royas in 1897.

Patrice Béghain calls the woman a "romantic Venus, indifferent and available," whose apparent modesty conceals a wish to satisfy both the senses and the mind, and he regards the small canvas as the museum's talisman. Raymond Escholier praises the modelling of the body amid velvets and silks and describes a clear symphony dominated by cool notes, which he finds recalls Vermeer. The palette rests on the three primary colours, giving the scene its striking simplicity.

Painter

Eugène Delacroix

Date

1827

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

24 × 32 cm

Museum

Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, Lyon

Genre

nude

Depicts

parrot, naked woman, drapery, woman, Psittacidae

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