Interpretive Resource

Edgar Degas listed nine portraits in the catalogue of the fifth Impressionist exhibition, in 1879; one he called Portrait After a Costume Ball. Yet, as was the case in every Impressionist exhibition in which he participated, the catalogue entries do not necessarily correspond to what he actually sent, and it seems as if this portrait was never exhibited.

The painting is among a handful of commissioned portraits by Degas. It represents Madame Dietz-Monnin, a patron of music, the wife of a wealthy industrialist and politician, and the mother-in-law of Degas’s friend Herman de Clermont. Degas may have borrowed money from the Clermont family during his own family’s financial crisis of 1876. To help out, the painter Auguste de Clermont, brother of Herman, convinced Madame Dietz-Monnin to commission a portrait at a set price. Degas took the commission seriously, writing letters to his sitter and arranging the details of her costume with great precision. The correspondence indicates that they had a falling out over certain aspects of his composition and that, when the completed painting was sent to her, she rejected it. Her reasons are not recorded, but the family history suggests that she thought Degas represented her as either a drunk or a prostitute! Whatever her complaints, she returned the portrait, but sent Degas full payment.

As a portrait, the painting is remarkable. ‘It depicts a woman in costume after a ball. At her back, a mirror records the room as a blur of color and light. Her feather boa droops across her mint green dress. She is clearly fatigued and waves at departing guests; most have already left as only empty, gilded chairs, surround her. Clearly, the party is over.

If the subject is odd — and, for a portrait, it is —the technique is equally unconventional. Instead of making a traditional pastel on paper or oil on canvas, Degas mixed oil paint, gouache, metallic paint, charcoal, and pastel to create a mixed-media work with few, if any, precedents in the history of art outside of Degas’s own career. Clearly, he was not only interested in the reflective qualities of actual objects like mirrors, satin, or gilded chairs, but also in the materials the artist could use to represent such objects.

It is easy, today, to condemn Madame Dietz-Monnin for rejecting this brilliantly original portrait. Degas did not flatter her. Instead, he chose to study a bourgeois woman at leisure — to show us her authentic self, not at its composed and charming best during the height of her party, but at the party’s end, when the world of illusion becomes one of reality. And, perhaps just as insulting, he never "finished" her, allowing his virtuoso technique to be so evident that we think more of him than of her.