Description
Year of creation: c. 1865
Original size: 89.7 cm x 117.2 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: National Gallery of Art, Washington (inv. 1963.10.125)
Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli – Edgar Degas
A woman sits in the foreground and looks straight at us. Her dark hair is parted in the middle and pinned back, her face calm and pale. A vivid red shawl falls across her shoulders and lap, and beneath it a pale cream skirt spreads widely and takes up the whole lower left. Our hand-painted canvas painting keeps exactly that balance between the red and the cream plane.
Two looks that do not meet
At the right a bearded man in a brown-olive jacket sits leaning on an armrest, his body turned aside and his head twisted towards us. She looks straight out, he over his shoulder; both look at the viewer and neither looks at the other. That gap between two gazes is what carries the whole double portrait.
Sofa, wallpaper, door frame
A red sofa with a carved wooden frame and a curved back rises at the lower right, its leg turned on a lathe. Behind them is a wall with green patterned paper, vertical stripes and small floral motifs; behind the man stands a grey door frame. At the upper right a lighter ochre space opens, with a figure thinly indicated in it.
Where the painting stops
Some passages, particularly the skirt and the right-hand background, have stayed thin and unfinished, and the canvas shows through the paint. Degas left the picture where it had said enough for him. Another portrait at an instrument is shown by Mademoiselle Dihau at the Piano, and another double portrait by Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste De Gas. The canvas measures 89.7 x 117.2 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.
