Portrait of Madame Jeantaud

Like Manet's "Child Portrait", Edgar Degas' (1834-1917) "Portrait of Madame Jeantaud" (c. 1877) is also situated in a dim interior. The subject is the wife of an engineer whom Degas met during the war in 1870/71. She sits on a light-coloured sofa with her dog beside her, and regards the viewer with friendly reserve. Degas used a relatively narrow palette, like Manet and Courbet, focusing the precision of his depiction on the sitter's face. In other zones of the painting - the area around the hands, for example, which rest one on top of the other - the paint literally begins to run. The position of the legs, which Madame Jeantaud had crossed, is only vaguely indicated. Although Degas constructed his painting in a truly classical and well thought-out composition of two intersecting diagonals (chaiselongue and body), he ignored the rules of one-point perspective and did not attend to correct foreshortening. Instead, with his wide-brushed, gestural painting method and generous, clearly separated light and dark colour fields, he emphasized the two-dimensional quality of the painting's surface. Degas clearly went a step further than Courbet and Manet in opening up the contours of figures and objects.