Apotheosis de Degas (After Ingres' L'apotheose d'Homere)

One of Edgar Degas's earliest documented involvements with photography occurred in 1885, when he directed the creation of a parody of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's grand history painting, The Apotheosis of Homer, now in the Louvre Museum. A local photographer, Walter Barnes, made the negative and print, surely following Degas's explicit instructions. Entitled the Apotheosis of Degas, it is very much an aggrandized self-portrait of Degas.