This composition, with its inventive cropping and velvety passages of pastel, reflects the influence of Degas, who befriended Bartholomé in the early 1880s. The sitter is the artist’s wife, Périe, known to be a "beautiful woman of delicate health, cultivated, and of supreme distinction." Upon her death in 1887 a grief-stricken Bartholomé abandoned painting and pastel. With Degas’s encouragement, he turned to sculpture; the monument he made for Périe's tomb marked the beginning of an accomplished career as a sculptor, working in metal and stone.
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