Manet's model, Victorine Meurent, had recently posed as the sassy nudes in Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass (both Musée d'Orsay, Paris). Here, looking relatively subdued, she flaunts an intimate silk dressing gown. Critics saw the painting as a rejoinder to Courbet's Woman with a Parrot (29.100.57) and as an indication of Manet's 'present vice' that he 'appreciates a head no more than a slipper'. Recent scholars have interpreted it as an allegory of the five senses: the nose-gay (smell), the orange (taste), the parrot-relative (hearing) and the monocle of the man who fingers them (seeing and touching).
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