Degas: Agency in Images of Women

BY EMMA WOLIN

Edgar Degas devoted much of his life’s work to the depiction of women. Among

his most famous works are his ballet dancers, bathers and milliners; more than three-

quarters of Degas’ total works featured images of women. 1 Recently, the work of Degas

has provoked feminist readings of the artist’s treatment of his subject matter. Degas

began by sketching female relatives and eventually moved on to sketch live nude

models; he was said to have been relentless in his pursuit of the female image. Some

scholars have read this tendency as obsessive or pathological, while others trace Degas’

fixation to his own familial relationships; Degas’ own mother died when he was a

teenager. 2 Degas painted women in more diverse roles than most of his contemporaries.

But was Degas a full-fledged misogynist? That may depend on one’s interpretation of

his oeuvre. Why did he paint so many women? In any case, whatever the motivation and

intent behind Degas’ images, there is much to be said for his portrayal of women. This

paper will attempt to investigate Degas’ treatment of women through criticism, critical

analysis, visual evidence and the author’s unique insight. Although the work of Degas is

frequently cited as being misogynistic, some of his work gives women more freedom

than they would have otherwise enjoyed, while other paintings, namely his nude

sketches, placed women under the direct scrutiny of the male gaze. Despite the ubiquity

1 Richard Kendall, Degas, Images of Women, (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1989), 11.
2 Richard Kendall, Degas, Images of Women, 11.

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of women in Degas’ art, the first exhibit to explicitly examine this topic did not occur

until 1989, when the Tate Gallery of England featured a show focusing on women in

Degas’ work.

Recent scholarship places Degas in one of two camps: first, the notion that Degas

is inherently misogynistic; second, that Degas did, in fact, privilege his women with

more agency than they would have otherwise been afforded. The notion of Degas’

misogyny was established and given its “classic literary formulation in the late

nineteenth century by writers like Huysmans and Paul Valery,” and since, “few scholars

have expressed discomfort with this label, and none have stopped to evaluate its sources

or question directly its validity.” 3 Other scholars have refrained from attacking the issue

directly, such as Jean Sutherland Boggs, who proposed that Degas’ portraits of women

could be “enchanted, affectionate, perceptive in a way that suggests that his reputed

misogyny was an affectation.” 4 In reading Degas’ work as either purely misogynistic or

privileging women, many scholars have overlooked the possibility of middle ground

between the two. As this paper will attempt to demonstrate, Degas painted women in

such an unprecedented and varied manner that casting definitive judgments about the

artist’s treatment of women often neglects the gray area between the two main

assessments of his oeuvre.

Edgar Degas was born into an upper class aristocratic family. After completing

his primary education, he enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied

under Louis Lamothe. It was there that Degas met the famed Neoclassical painter Jean

3 Norma Broude, “Degas's ‘Misogyny,’" The Art Bulletin 59, no. 1 (March 1977): 95.
4 Norma Broude, “Degas's ‘Misogyny,’" 95.

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Auguste Dominque Ingres, who advised Degas to paint from both memory and life, and

that by doing so he would, in time, become a great painter. Degas’ social standing

determined the way he interacted with many women, as well as his perceptions of lower

and working class women, which will be discussed in more detail later.

Though contemporary scholarship has associated Degas with Impressionism, the

artist himself rejected the term, finding it insulting. His earlier works are most

accurately linked with realism, though as his career progressed, he moved towards

Impressionism. Impressionists forewent the traditional, confining practice of painting

indoors and rigorous academy training, as was common with Neoclassicism. Instead,

they were largely self-taught and they opted to paint outside—en plein air—to maximize

the benefits of natural lighting. Impressionists were concerned with capturing the way

natural light struck their subject matter in precisely that moment, so that “they might be

objectively, even scientifically, true to visual reality.” 5 In this sense, according to Norma

Broude, Impressionism can be understood as a “scientifically motivated form of optical

realism as an art that rejected the expressive goals of the earlier Romantic movement.”

Broude maintains, “even in relatively recent literature, we can still read that the

Impressionists were artists who eliminated the reflection of human feelings in nature.” 6

Just as Romanticism was a departure from the rigidity of Neoclassicism, Impressionism

took this departure a step further, with long, thin and overall looser brushstrokes and

“lack of conventional draftsmanship, which many critics of the period objected to, in

5 Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after
Postmodernism. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 217.
6 Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, Reclaiming Female Agency, 217.

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gendered terms, as feminine and suitable only to the limited intellectual capabilities of

women.” 7 Impressionists did not attempt to disguise their brushstrokes. Often times,

this technique resulted in an image that appeared to be fuzzy or in soft-focus. Minute

details were sacrificed in favor of an overall visual effect. The inclusion of movement as

part of the human experience of perceiving and viewing an image was of great

importance to the Impressionists. Impressionistic works were never stagnant and have a

dynamic rhythm that conveys motion and life. However, this technique also served to

further the feminization of the genre, at least in Impressionist landscapes. One critic

writing about the Impressionists in 1886 talked about the “masculine principle” that

informed the figure paintings of Manet, Degas, Renoir, etc., while he found the

“feminine” in the landscape paintings of Monet, Boudin, Sisley and Pissarro: “The

tenderness and grace of Impressionism are reserved for its landscapes while for

humanity there is only the hard reality of the naked truth.” 8 Critics such as Benedict

Nicholson also saw this alleged harshness in figurative depictions, specifically in those

of women, stating that Degas’ paintings contained a “bewildering indifference to the

grace of women…it is not that he treats a woman as though she were a horse: he treats

her with more savagery.” 9

Degas’ social standing determined how he encountered his subjects. Degas’ first

subjects were his female relatives: women of the same high social status as himself—

though Degas generally did not afford the women he depicted with as much privilege as

7 Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, Reclaiming Female Agency, 221.

8 Ibid., 220.
9 Norma Broude, “Degas's ‘Misogyny,’" 95.

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he enjoyed as a man of the late nineteenth century. As Degas furthered his artistic career,

he branched out and began painting working class women: ballet dancers, laundresses,

shop-girls, milliners, and professional models with whom he came into daily contact. In

a radical new way, Degas rejected the grandiose nature of the history painting that was

typical of Neoclassicism and opted to paint more ordinary scenes that were true to

modern life, which will be examined in more detail later.

In 1858, Degas lived in Italy with family and it was there that he created one of

his earliest masterpieces, The Bellelli Family (Figure 1). Degas portrays his aunt, Laura

Bellelli, as well as her husband and their two daughters. The pyramid composition of

the women of the family demonstrates Degas’ study of Renaissance art, which was

abundant and readily available to him in Italy. Laura Bellelli’s gesture connects and

aligns her with her two daughters, who are seated in font of her. Meanwhile, the

patriarch, Gennaro Bellelli, looks on somberly. While Laura’s gestures connect her to

her daughters, her husband’s position renders him distanced from the women in his

family. Correspondences between Laura Bellelli and her family confirm the unhappy

union that existed between the two spouses. 10 The father’s position at the desk alludes

to his role as a businessman, associating him with the outside world. The painting

speaks to Degas’ acute “awareness of his relatives’ marital difficulties,” as well as his

“remarkable sensitivity to the subtle pressures and tensions that existed within the

10 Eunice Lipton and Edgar Degas, Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) , 31.

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family unit.” 11 Though some have claimed that this painting, along with the time Degas

spent in his relatives’ household in the midst of a failing marriage, speaks to a

“permanent fear and suspicion of women” instilled in Degas from an early age, there is,

according to Norma Broude, “nothing in the portrait itself that might tell us conclusively

and objectively which side Degas’ own sympathies lay—if, indeed, he did take sides.” 12

Historically, women have been the subject of male gaze and scrutiny in art,

depicted as objects existing solely for the purpose of male pleasure. They are portrayed

as submissive, a characteristic that is supported by gazes cast downwards, hardly ever

making eye contact. Feminist art history turns its inquiry of these depictions outwards

and attempts to “correct historical gender inequities by recovering women’s history and

revealing gender distortion in the canonical record.” 13 Unfortunately, a significant

amount of scholarship on Degas is all too quick to dismiss his work as sexist and

fundamentally harmful to women.

Interestingly enough, various paintings by Degas depict female subjects in the

act of seeing. In Woman With Field Glasses (Figure 2), as the title suggests, Degas shows a

woman looking blatantly outward at the viewer, holding a pair of spectacles up to her

face. These works draw the viewer’s focus to the importance and the subjective nature of

seeing. Degas claimed, “one sees as one wishes to see. It’s false; and it is this falsity that

constitutes art.” 14 Degas emphasized the discretionary nature of both seeing and the art

making process. Other works make explicit reference to the visual process by showing

11 Norma Broude, “Degas's ‘Misogyny,’" 97.

12 Ibid.
13 Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, Reclaiming Female Agency, 1.

14 Richard Kendall, Degas, Images of Women, 7.

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women gazing into mirrors or examining other works of art. Degas’ art claims that the

act of seeing is not merely a passive one, rather an act that can be charged with

significance, be it a message of vanity, sexuality, or inquiry. Feminist theory argues that

there is a hierarchy of gender in Western culture’s looking—men look, women are

observed. 15 According to this established canon, Degas’ Woman With Field Glasses defies

this trait with her blatant outward gaze. There is something scrutinizing, inquisitive,

confrontational, and perhaps even threatening about the way the woman looks out at

and confronts the viewer. This act is no doubt bold and purposeful, even more so for a

woman in the late nineteenth century.

The ideal, proper woman of the nineteenth century was passive and docile, and

did not leave her home unless she was escorted by a male chaperone. A woman

behaving so brashly like the one in Woman With Field Glasses breaks free from this

confining passivity to establish an unprecedented new standard. By depicting this

woman so explicitly engaged in the act of seeing, and imbuing her with subjectivity,

Degas empowers his subject with a privilege that was usually only enjoyed by men. In

this sense, Degas’ work can be seen as favorable and even empowering towards women.

Degas distinguishes in his paintings between a momentary glimpse and

prolonged, thoughtful vision and contemplation; most of his works reflect the latter.

Degas regularly painted and sketched from different vantage points, many of which

were unprecedented in art. Often times Degas would position himself above or below

his subject to gain access to a different way of seeing. This technique “created pictures of

Griselda Pollock, Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision, (London:
15

Pandora, 1992), 106.

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extraordinary originality and immediacy, but also placed [Degas] outside the

conventional routines of human contact.” 16 This vantage point permitted Degas to

observe but not to participate, as though he were a fly on a wall, allowing him to assume

a neutral vantage point. Notable is the fact that Degas only placed himself above his

subjects when portraying working class women. 17 His portraits of bourgeoisie women

are conducted at eye-level with his patrons, suggesting an equality of status, whereas he

literally looks down upon the lower class women, indicating their inferiority.

In Degas’ pastel entitled The Tub (Figure 3), we see a woman’s back as she kneels

in a tub to bathe. This sketch is part of a series of nude bathers, a subject that

preoccupied Degas throughout his career, particularly towards the end of his life. Degas

has clearly sketched his model from a higher vantage point, perhaps a ladder. We see

the delicate curves of the bather’s back and hips as she crouches down to bathe. She

delicately places her hair behind her neck and out of her way. There is an anonymous

quality to the bather’s identity, as we cannot make out many of the details of her face.

The pastels give the work a soft feeling, much like the fuzzy out-of-focus effects seen in

other Impressionist works done in oil paints. On the table beside her are the

accoutrements of a woman grooming herself: a brush, a mirror, a water pitcher and a

towel. In this respect, Degas’ The Tub can be seen as documenting modern daily life, just

as Degas’ scenes of Parisian street cafes, operas, and millinery shops did. Degas

indicates the bather’s inferiority by placing himself, as well as the viewer, above her. We

see this theme repeated in some of Degas’ portrayals of ballet dancers, who were

16 Richard Kendall, Degas, Images of Women, 9.

17 Ibid.

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considered working women in their time. By painting from different vantage points, and

placing himself above his subjects, Degas reinforces longstanding societal norms

regarding class interactions. The theme of a nude bather is repeated throughout Degas’

oeuvre, particularly towards the end of his career when he focused on brothel

monotypes.

Degas worked in a Paris that was on the cusp of the modern world as we know

it. Society fixated on material goods; items for sale were on display wherever one

looked—in shops, arcades, street corners and markets. Some women even offered their

bodies as commodities. This fixation on material culture and buyer power is evident in

the art of Degas, who painted modern city life. Some of Degas’ favorite locations to

depict were the race tracks, bars, operas, dance studios, outdoor cafés, and milliner

shops that were frequented by the highest ranks of Parisian society. It was here that

Degas encountered the upper classes (and those who worked tirelessly to entertain

them) that captivated him and occupied the majority of his canvases. The work of Edgar

Degas can be viewed as documentary evidence of the daily life of the upper class in

Paris on the cusp of modernism. Degas was “uncompromisingly contemporary” in his

images of women, who were seen “at their toilette or at their work in theaters, laundries,

millinery shops or brothels,” thus stripped away of “idealized conventions, thereby

challenging some of the most cherished myths of his society.” 18 In this sense, Degas’

paintings of working women provided them with more agency and influence than they

would have otherwise.

18 Ibid.

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 Degas’ 1882 work entitled At the Milliner’s (Figure 4) is illustrative of Degas’

depictions of women outside of the aforementioned “idealized conventions” of his time.

In this painting, the artist returns again to the theme of vision—we see a woman looking

in a mirror as she is trying on a hat in a milliner’s shop. The mirror is turned away from

the viewer, so that only the woman looking into it can see herself. On the opposite side

of the mirror we see the milliner, who tends to the customer patiently, holding two other

hat options in her hands. The milliner’s face is obscured by the mirror, which trivializes

her importance. She is just another member of Paris’s working class. The customer

glances in the mirror at her own reflection, scrutinizing her appearance and adjusting

the hat that she is trying on. As Degas’ other works from the theatre and nightlife of

Paris show us, no self-respecting upper class French woman was seen in public without

a hat. Degas privileges the act of seeing by not revealing the woman’s reflection to the

viewer and forcing one to imagine for oneself what the woman sees in the mirror.

Though this image was created in pastels rather than oil paints, it still has the loose,

sketch-like composition that was typical of Impressionist works.

In Degas’ Visit to the Museum (Figure 5), we see fellow Impressionist Mary

Cassatt and a female companion admiring paintings in the Louvre. As a woman of high

social standing, she did not leave the house without a chaperone, who in this case is her

female companion. Cassatt, whom Degas painted many times throughout his career,

stands upright and self-assuredly with her fist firmly planted on her hip. While her

companion looks at what appears to be a guidebook, perhaps directing the visitor as to

how to interpret the piece, Cassatt stares directly at the work of art. This posture and

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direct glance establishes Cassatt’s sense of self as well as security with her identity.

Cassatt’s face is tilted slightly upward, exuding an air of confidence. Her cocked head

shows the different angle she seeks in interpreting the painting. Her look is somewhat

critical and scrutinizing, as if she has a critique to offer of the work she is examining.

Surely, as an artist herself, Cassatt would have an opinion and perhaps even critique of

the work. Cassatt’s face is fully detailed, while the face of her companion is somewhat

ambiguous and less defined. The darkness of the women’s dresses is offset by the light

colors of the wood of the floor and walls surrounding them. The thick brushstrokes are

undisguised and make the act of creating the work of art just as important as viewing

the work altogether. Degas does not show the actual painting that Cassatt is looking at—

that is something the viewer is left to imagine for herself. Once again, Degas shows us

women engaged in the act of seeing—a deliberate act charged with meaning—which

lends itself to female agency.

In one of Degas’ earlier works from 1860, Young Spartan Girls Challenging Boys

(Figure 6), we see a confrontation between two groups of Spartan youth, both minimally

clad. The military state of Sparta afforded both men and women the same status, at least

in terms of the right to cultivate a chiseled, athletic physique. 19 The scene, which was

first displayed in the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition of April 1880, has been interpreted

as an “expression of competitive and unhealthy hostility between the sexes,” one that

reflected a “personal fear and dislike of women on Degas’s part.” 20 The painting takes

Martin Kemp, “Spartan Sport Laid Bare,” Nature 454, no. 28 (2008): 1053.
19

Norma Broude, “Edgar Degas and French Feminism, ca. 1880: ‘The Young Spartans,’ The Brothel
20

Monotypes, and the Bathers Revisited,” The Art Bulletin 70, no. 4 (Dec. 1988): 641.

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place on an open, grassy plain with supple mountains forming in the background. The

posture of both the young Spartan girls and boys suggests a climax in action—the peak

of a moment that has been building up for quite some time. The girls lunge readily

while extending their arms towards the boys, a gesture meant to provoke and taunt. The

boys are stretching in the final moments before a presumed stand off, perhaps a race of

some sort. One boy kneels on all fours, as though he has regressed to some sort of

animalistic, primitive state. Both sexes entice the opposite with their gestures and

glares. Degas captures a moment of the peak of heightened tension between the youths.

Even the modern viewer gets a sense of anticipation of conflict and tension from the

work; this is a testament to Degas’ commitment to painting action and the emotions that

surround it.

Young Spartan Girls Challenging Boys communicates the stress and build-up

present in the air just before competition. In the background, adults are gathered in a

cluster, standing huddled before their children engage in a competition. The colors in

this work are warmer hues, including yellows, oranges, and tan skin-tones. These colors

are offset by the lush, green tones of the surrounding landscape. Degas’ primary

education, which included knowledge of classics and ancient civilization, would have

informed his familiarity of Spartan social customs. Degas was “deeply interested in

physiognomy, ethnography, anthropology, and criminology,” all of which affected his

understanding of the human body and the environments that primitive peoples found

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themselves within. 21 Norma Broude argues that the painting had a much different

meaning when Degas exhibited it in 1880 than when he first began the work in 1860. 22 In

the 1880s in Paris, early ideas about French feminism were developing, emerging as a

significant political force and social consciousness of the French people. The idea that

women might be able to openly challenge their potential mates and male counterparts

would have tied in to newly-forming ideas about women’s rights. With this

understanding, the painting was later described as a “natural confrontation among

equals.” 23 What appears on the surface to be homage to classical antiquity in the

traditional manner of history painting turns out to be a documentation of classical

gender roles applied to nineteenth century developing ideas about feminism.

Over the past century, there has been a tremendous amount of scholarship on

Degas and his treatment of women. Some art historians argue that his images were

fundamentally harmful to a woman’s individuality. There are major issues with

interpreting Degas’ oeuvre as solely misogynistic or as privileging women with agency,

as it is difficult to pinpoint Degas’ treatment of women, because it varies from painting

to painting. Paintings like Woman With Field Glasses empower the woman by giving her

agency through her direct and outward stare. Works like The Tub are harmful to the

status of women by portraying her as an object, not as a human being, to be—quite

literally—glanced down upon. Degas sought to capture the daily life of the modern

Paris in which he lived, and perhaps a woman’s societal role was changing too quickly

21 Martin Kemp, “Spartan Sport Laid Bare,” 1053.

22 Norma Broude, “Edgar Degas and French Feminism,” 641.
23 Ibid.

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to be recorded accurately in a single work. Reading Degas’ oeuvre as fundamentally

misogynistic or as privileging women often results overlooking the middle ground

between the two. In any case, one may look to Degas’ oeuvre for a variety of

representations of women.

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 Figure 1. The Bellelli Family (c. 1858-67), image courtesy of the Musée de Orsay

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 Figure 2. Woman With Field Glasses (c. 1875-6), image courtesy of Galerie Neue

Meister

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 Figure 3. The Tub (c. 1886), image courtesy of the Musée de Orsay

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 Figure 4. At the Milliner’s (c. 1882), image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum

of Art

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 Figure 5. Visit to a Museum (c. 1879-90), image courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts

Boston

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 Figure 6. Young Spartan Girls Challenging Boys (c. 1860), image courtesy of the National

Gallery, London

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