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

When it was painted

In 1875 Degas, just past forty, spent four months in Naples. His father's side of the family lived there, and Italian relatives were nothing new to him. In his twenties he had painted his aunt's household in Florence in a large group portrait, The Bellelli Family.

This visit came in a hard season. His father had died the year before, in 1874. Afterward the family business turned out to be deep in debt, and for years Degas put his own money toward paying it off. That same spring of 1874, in Paris, he and his friends had opened the first Impressionist exhibition. A bold step for his art and a heavy loss at home landed in the same year.

The Naples house had its own mourning. Lucie, his young cousin, had lost both parents, and her elderly uncle Henri had taken her in. Degas seldom accepted portrait commissions. The people he chose to paint were mostly family and close friends, like these two.

The canvas was never finished, and it stayed with the family in Naples. It was still with them after Lucie grew up and became the Marchioness Guerrero de Balde. In 1926 it passed through the New York dealer Wildenstein to the Chicago collector Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn, and in 1933 it entered the Art Institute of Chicago.

Now look again at the table at the bottom, piled with papers. The museum suggests that Degas painted from the far side of it, a third relative looking at the other two. A painter who had just lost his own father was standing right where we stand, looking at two people dressed in black.