Portraits at the Stock Exchange

Edgar Degas

ca. 1878–79 · Pastel on paper, pieced, and laid down on canvas · European Paintings

Degas presents a glimpse of the busy commerce at the Paris stock exchange. Financier and art collector Ernest May (1845–1925), wearing spectacles, receives a document for perusal, as an associate, identified as Monsieur Bolâtre, leans over his shoulder. The artist made this pastel as a study for an oil painting of 1878–79 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). At the time, May was in his early thirties, and just beginning to expand his acquisitions from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pictures to works by Degas, Manet, and their colleagues.

Artist

Edgar Degas

Date

ca. 1878–79

Medium

Pastel on paper, pieced, and laid down on canvas

Department

European Paintings

Credit line

Gift of Janice H. Levin, 1991