Portrait of Mme Lisle and Mme Loubens

Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas · c. 1867

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

84 × 96.6 cm (33 1/16 × 38 in.); Framed: 101.6 × 115 × 8 cm (40 × 45 1/4 × 3 1/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Portrait of Mme Lisle and Mme Loubens is a quietly commanding double portrait that reveals Degas at his most formally accomplished, before the racecourses and ballet studios came to define his reputation. Painted around 1867, the work belongs to a period when Degas was still deeply engaged with the Old Masters — his early training under Louis Lamothe, a devoted follower of Ingres, left a clear mark on the precision of his draftsmanship and the controlled elegance of his figure work. The two women are rendered with an intimacy that stops short of sentimentality, their poses studied but not stiff, their expressions held in that careful ambiguity Degas seemed to prize in his sitters. It is a painting more interested in observation than flattery. Degas showed work at the Salon throughout the 1860s and was regarded by contemporaries as a promising figure in the academic tradition — a reputation his later Impressionist associations would partly obscure. A hand-painted oil reproduction on canvas allows this restrained, psychologically rich portrait to be experienced beyond the museum wall, with every passage of paint — the fabric folds, the subtle modelling of the faces — faithfully recreated by a skilled artist working directly from the original.