Interpretive Resource

The privileged son of a banker, Edgar Degas did not have to rely on portrait commissions for a livelihood, but he was unquestionably the finest portrait painter among the Impressionists, if not in all of Europe during the last half of the nineteenth century. Although not the most monumental of the portraits he painted of his Italian relatives, Uncle and Niece is surely among the very greatest. Degas presents us with his uncle, Henri de Gas, and his first cousin, Lucie de Gas, in the simple setting of the family apartment in Naples. Degas himself was a Parisian, but most of his father’s family lived and worked in Italy. His three uncles lived there throughout their lives, and two of his aunts married Italians. Lucie de Gas was the orphaned daughter of Edouard de Gas and his wife, Candide de Montejasi. Lucie was raised first by her uncle Achille, who died in 1875, and afterward by her uncle Henri, the man portrayed here.

This portrait was probably painted in the summer of 1875, the year following the death of Degas’s own father, Auguste Degas. Made not for public exhibition, but for private use, the portrait addresses basic questions of loneliness and death. We are confronted with two people, an orphan and an old bachelor, who have come together under tragic circum-stances Lucie is dressed in mourning, and Henri is also clad entirely in black. Degas, too, was in mourning for his father.

Degas has caught them, almost photographically, in the midst of their domestic routine. Henri has been reading the paper while smoking, and Lucie has been amusing herself by reading over his shoulder. The painter — and the viewer — has just entered the room; Henri has put down the paper and taken his cigar from his mouth, perhaps to speak; Lucie looks silently at us, her head tilted jauntily at the same angle as her uncle’s. Presented, in a sense, as opposites — an old man and a young girl — they are at once together and apart: together in their shared activity, and separate in the rigidly divided zones of Degas’s composition.

The portrait is a triumph of silhouetted forms and carefully observed gestures. In all probability, Degas never finished the picture, but it remains so satisfying that this scarcely matters. The relationship between uncle and niece that this painting portrays so casually and with so much assurance seems still to live within it, speaking to us today of the fragile continuities of family life in the modern world.