At the Milliner's

Edgar Degas made this pastel in 1882, one of more than twenty works about the Paris hat trade that he produced on and off between the mid-1870s and 1910. Pastel is dry colour pressed into sticks and drawn straight onto the surface, and Degas pushed it further than almost any artist of his time, building it up in layers as he worked. He drew here on cheap industrial wrapping paper rather than fine artist's paper, later laid down on a fabric support, a practical habit that suited how quickly he liked to work. The model was not a professional but the American painter Mary Cassatt, a friend and colleague who sat for him occasionally; she later said she posed only when he found a movement difficult and a hired model could not get his idea. Millinery was a large and highly visible Paris industry in these years, and Degas was as interested in the labour behind the shop as in the customers it served. He was born in Paris in 1834 into a banking family and trained in the disciplined drawing tradition of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose insistence on line stayed with him for the rest of his career. He helped organise the independent exhibitions that gave the Impressionists their name and took part in nearly all of them, although he disliked the term and preferred to call himself a realist. This sheet was shown in the eighth and last of those exhibitions, held in Paris in 1886.