Henri Degas and His Niece Lucie Degas (The Artist's Uncle and Cousin)

Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas · 1875–76

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

99.8 × 119.9 cm (39 1/4 × 47 3/16 in.); Framed: 118.2 × 137.8 × 8.9 cm (46 1/2 × 54 1/4 × 3 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Realism

This intimate double portrait offers a quietly compelling study of family — the elderly Henri Degas, banker and patriarch of the artist's Neapolitan relatives, seated beside his daughter Lucie in a moment of still, dignified coexistence. Degas painted this work during one of his visits to Naples, where his father's family had settled generations earlier. Unlike his celebrated ballet scenes, his portraits from this period reveal a different register of attention — slower, more psychological, deeply attentive to the particular weight of a person's presence. He builds the figures with confident, sculptural brushwork while keeping the background deliberately spare, forcing the eye back to the faces and the unspoken dynamic between the two sitters. Degas maintained close ties with his Italian relatives throughout his life, and several of his most searching family portraits came out of these Neapolitan visits — the New Orleans family scenes of 1872-73 and this work both demonstrate how seriously he took portraiture as a form, even as critics would later define him almost entirely by his dancers. The hand-painted oil reproduction renders the subdued palette and the psychological stillness of the original with care, bringing the same warmth and restraint that distinguishes Degas's finest intimate work.