Description
Year of creation: 1868
Original size: 114.3 cm x 81.3 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Philadelphia Museum of Art (inv. 1986-26-10)
The Rape – Edgar Degas
A small middle-class bedroom lit by a single lamp. At the left a woman sits in a white slip, bent forward, her face turned away; a dark garment falls over the back of her chair. At the right, by the door, a man stands in a dark jacket with his hands in his pockets. Our canvas painting keeps exactly that tension between two people who are not looking at each other.
One single lamp
All the light comes from a table lamp in the middle of the room. That one light does two things: it lifts the woman’s back and shoulders out of the dark, and it turns the man into a dark shape against the door, with a shadow spreading across the wall. Between them lie a bare floor and a white garment thrown down on the boards. That empty middle is the real subject.
The sewing box on the table
On the round table stands an open sewing box with a pink lining – the only clear patch of colour in the scene and the only object somebody has just been using. The setting is orderly and bourgeois: bed, wallpaper, fireplace, mirror. The contrast between the tidy room and whatever has happened in it, or is about to, carries the whole canvas.
A title that is not the painter’s
Degas never gave this picture the name The Rape. He called it simply Interior, and the museum still holds it under that name; the scene has often been linked to a novel by Zola, but a literary source has never been proven. The same quiet, working reality carries Woman Ironing and A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers. The canvas measures 114.3 x 81.3 cm.
Our version
Our version is a hand-painted oil painting on canvas. Every canvas is painted individually, in the size and frame you choose. The painter works from the original with brush and oils, so the strokes and the layering stay visible – the part a print cannot reproduce.
