Degas’s female sitter appears serene yet, according to the English painter Walter Sickert, who knew Degas and later bought the painting, this work was painted around the time of the siege of Paris by the Prussians in 1871. Sickert recalled that ‘Degas said the lady was a sort of loose woman [une sorte de cocotte]’ who modelled for him and whom he paid with a hunk of meat ‘which she fell upon, so hungry was she, and devoured raw’. Her sombre dress and the tranquillity of the scene belie what must have been her desperation at a moment when the city was suffering from a severe shortage of food.

Instead of conventionally lighting the woman to show off her features, Degas backlit his sitter by staging her before a luminous window. The light dematerialises the figure, leaving only her silhouette visible and recreating the visual effect of walking into a dark room with a strong point of light before our eyes have time to adjust to their surroundings.

This painting is technically one of the artist’s most experimental works. He employed the essence technique, in which the paint is drained of its oil and thinned with turpentine, resulting in a medium with a matt effect that can be handled like watercolour. Degas thus explores the interchangeability of drawing and painting, creating fluid outlines with thinned black paint and matt white highlights. The work also exhibits evidence of smudging and dabbing, possibly with a cloth, in the way that an artist might work with watercolour to soften areas of the composition. Many of Degas’s less formally finished works, such as this one, remained in his studio through his career, but this work is signed, indicating it was intended to be sold or given as a gift.

Provenance:

Purchased by Samuel Courtauld from The Leicester Galleries, London, March 1927, for £1,500;

Courtauld Gift, 1932