A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers (Madame Paul Valpinçon?)

The painting is signed and dated 1865 twice. Infrared photographs made in 1987 show that the partly obscured date is 1865 not 1858 as was previously assumed. X-rays taken in 1987 reveal that the bouquet originally extended farther to the right but that Degas scraped that part out and painted the figure of the woman over it. A drawing for the figure of the woman is in the Fogg Art Museum Cambridge Mass. The sitter was once thought to be Mme Charlotte Hertel but is now tentatively identified as Marguerite-Claire Valpinçon wife of Degas's friend Paul Valpinçon. Mme Valpinçon also appears in a small notebook drawing (about 1862; location unknown) in a portrait drawing with her husband (1861; Morgan Library & Museum New York) and in the painting At the Races in the Countryside (1869; L281; Museum of Fine Arts Boston).