Brothel Scene

Leaning over a prostitute, an officer slyly slips his hand over her right shoulder. The prostitute's deep absorption in her card game contrasts sharply with the soldier's furtive glance. Does he gaze at her cards or down the back or the front of her loose dress? With careless strokes, Edgar Degas quickly defined the woman's fleshy body and the man's broad form. Fascinated by the numerous gestures that reveal social class and sentiment, Degas focused his art on situations that only genre painters had fully used before, such as the class tensions between a man and a woman or the undercurrent of violence and domination in an affair.

Edmond de Goncourt's novel La Fille Elisa (The Girl Elisa) was published in March 1877 and quickly caught Degas's attention. In the same year, Degas sketched several drawings based on its events in his notebook. The book tells the tragic story of a girl who becomes a prostitute, first in the country and then in a poor quarter of Paris near the École Militaire. She later falls in love with a soldier and murders him in a rage.