Edgar Degas - Woman with an Umbrella. Berthe Jeantaud 1876

Woman with an Umbrella 1876
Woman with an Umbrella. Berthe Jeantaud
1876 61x50cm oil/canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada

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From National Gallery of Canada:
With her dour expression and plain features, "Woman with an Umbrella" appears indebted to the Realist tradition of painting exactly what one sees. Her heavy jacket, hat, and thick scarf only enhance her distanced, sombre look. When the work appeared in a Degas exhibition held in New York in 1949, the modernist critic Clement Greenberg wrote of the portrait, "The head is Ingresque but more intensely naturalistic, brushed in with a swift yet precise delicacy that reminds one of Goya." Degas first used the canvas for a three-quarter length, standing figure of a woman wearing a black dress over a white blouse. Part of a sleeve is still visible in the middle of the coat of the woman with an umbrella.