Young Woman with Her Hand over Her Mouth

The painting Young Woman with Her Hand over Her Mouth by Edgar Degas was executed between 1870 and 1880, a crucial decade that spanned the height of the Impressionist movement in France. The medium employed is oil colors freely mixed with turpentine on canvas, a technique which allowed Degas to achieve a light, dry, and matt surface quality. This method contrasts sharply with the thick impasto typical of some contemporary oil painting, linking the canvas more closely to the ephemeral texture he often achieved in his later pastels.

This piece is a compelling example of Degas’s devotion to modern portraiture, focusing intensely on the individual subject—one of the many sensitive depictions of women that occupied the artist throughout his career. The unidentified young woman is rendered with a striking sense of captured intimacy, her identity partially obscured by the expressive, almost nervous gesture of her hand covering the lower half of her face. This movement captures a fleeting psychological moment, characteristic of Degas's desire to document the unposed reality of human interaction rather than the formal, static approach dominating earlier academic painting.

The work's loose application of paint and its emphasis on gesture over elaborate detail mark it as distinctly modern. This significant canvas is housed in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. While the original remains a protected treasure, high-quality fine art prints, often sourced from public domain image libraries, allow for the widespread study and appreciation of this unique piece of nineteenth-century French art.