A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers

The sitter is almost certainly the wife of Paul Valpinçon, Degas's closest schoolboy friend, whose country estate Ménil-Hubert in Normandy Degas visited repeatedly throughout his life. The question mark in the title reflects that the identification, though widely accepted, has never been definitively confirmed. The painting entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer in 1929 — one of the most consequential single gifts of Impressionist art in American museum history. Louisine Havemeyer, guided by her close friend Mary Cassatt, assembled the collection that bore her name and left 65 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works to the Met on her death. A preparatory pencil drawing of the sitter, also dated 1865, is held at the Fogg Museum at Harvard.