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The J. Paul Getty Museum has recently acquired The Milliners, a compositionally complex and emotionally resonant painting that reveals Edgar Degas's penchant for experimentation and his habit of reworking, rethinking, and refining his paintings.
The Milliners is one of twenty-two surviving paintings, pastels, and drawings of the subject that Degas made over the course of approximately thirty years, from about 1880 to 1910. In The Milliners, two hatmakers sit at a dramatically angled table, their bodies partially obscured by three hat stands that punctuate their cramped work space. One woman actively works on a hat, rendered almost as a shadow, while the other appears lost in thought, gazing beyond the frame with an anxious expression.
Discoveries made upon x-ray examination of this painting reveal that the milliner on the left originally wore a hat, had ruffles at her wrists, and wore a scarf around her neck—details indicating that the artist initially conceived of her as a customer. Degas's reworking of the picture and altering of the identity of the figure from bourgeoise to laborer reveals his process and his characteristically modern commitment to portraying the working class. Degas's compositional choices—the dramatically angled worktable, the looming hat stands, and the vibrant ribbons—underscore the painting's remarkable modernity.
The Milliners complements the Getty's growing collection of late nineteenth-century art and relates strongly to works by Degas already in the collection, including The Convalescent, about 1872–87, which also explores female lassitude and blends the conventions of portraiture and genre painting. Other works by Degas in the Getty's collection include After the Bath, about 1895; Self-Portrait, about 1857–58; the recently acquired pastel of Miss Lala at the Fernando Circus, 1879; Waiting: Dancer and Woman with Umbrella, about 1882; the Halévy sketchbook of about 1877; and an important collection of photographs taken by Degas in the 1890s.
The Milliners also bears a compelling relationship with the Museum's monumental late work by Paul Cézanne, Young Italian Woman at a Table, about 1895–1900, with shared thematic and compositional concerns. Both paintings present women in contemplative, almost melancholic poses, and both are late works—produced at the turn of the twentieth century—that celebrate modern painting and the questions it poses.
The Milliners is on view in the Museum's West Pavilion.
Press Release
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