Woman with a Parrot - oil painting by French painter Édouard Manet, painted in 1866 and currently kept at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The work is 185.1 cm high and 128.6 cm wide. The canvas depicts the artist's favorite model, Victorine Meurent [1], who is wearing a long pink bathrobe. She is holding a bouquet of violets in her hand, and next to her, on a stand, sits the parrot from the title of the painting. Of the many portraits of Victorine Meurent that Manet has painted, this one presents the most delicate, soft tones of color. The painting was a reference or a response to the work of Gustave Courbet of the same title, depicting a naked woman with a parrot. When Manet presented his work in the Salon of Rejected in 1868, one critic wrote that he "borrowed a parrot from his friend Courbet and put it on a perch next to a young woman in a pink bathrobe" [2]. In 1889, a New York collector, Erwin Davis, donated the painting along with another work by Manet (The Boy with a Sword) to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. These were the first paintings by a French painter to appear in this museum [3].
