Interpretive Resource

Edgar Degas is often thought of as a quintessential Parisian—yet his family was as much Italian as it was French, and more of his relatives lived in Naples and Florence than in Paris. In the mid-1870s, when the Impressionists were organizing their first group exhibitions in the French capital, Degas had to make several trips to Naples to deal with family business. During a four-month stay in 1875, he painted this double portrait of his young, orphaned cousin Lucie and her bachelor uncle Henri, in whose care she had recently been placed. The work sensitively depicts two people separated by many years in age, who are tentatively accepting their new circumstances. Having lost his own father the previous year, Degas empathetically captured the atmosphere of loneliness and melancholy that must have suffused the household. Both Henri and Lucie wear heavy, black mourning clothes; they tilt their heads at the same angle and direct their gazes toward the artist.

Degas created this complex portrait with very economical means. He limited his palette to yellows, browns, black, and white, and applied the paint in long, straight strokes, deliberately leaving some areas of the canvas unresolved. Because the two figures seem to have been interrupted by his arrival in the room, the scene has an almost photographic aspect. Yet it is far from casual: Degas organized the composition into careful, even rigid, geometric areas that both link and divide uncle and niece. Although they share a home and engage in quotidian activities together—Lucie has probably just been reading the newspaper over her uncle’s shoulder—their future together is unclear. Uncle and Niece (Henri Degas and His Niece Lucie Degas) is a penetrating study of familial relationships, with their implied physical and psychological resemblances, and their potential affinities and estrangements.