The Millinery Shop

About this artwork

The Millinery Shop is the largest of Edgar Degas’s paintings focused on milliners, or hatmakers. He arranged the composition carefully, making multiple drawings and pastels of the lone figure, perfecting the woman’s pose and experimenting with her outfit. The final composition highlights the visual ambiguities of class identity that arose in France in the late nineteenth century. The woman sits in a hat shop examining a wide-brimmed hat. She wears a fashionable green wool dress with long, elegan...

Art Historical Context

Nestled in the Art Institute of Chicago's collection of European paintings, *The Millinery Shop* (1879–86) by Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas captures a intimate glimpse into late 19th-century Parisian. Painted in oil on canvas, this-scale work (100 × 110.7 cm) showcases Degas's fascination with modern urban scenes, particularly the world of women in everyday settings like fashionable hat shops, or *millineries*. As a founding member of the Impressionists—though he eschewed the label himself—Degas bridged Realism and Impressionism, favoring structured compositions over fleeting outdoor light effects. The painting depicts two women in a sunlit interior: one seated at a table amid ribbons and hats, the other standing in profile, trying on millinery. Degas's masterful use of oil allowed him to layer rich colors and subtle textures, evoking the tactile luxury of fabrics and the soft glow filtering through windows. Created over several years during the height of Impressionist exhibitions, it reflects the era's cultural shift toward celebrating consumer culture and feminine leisure amid France's Belle Époque. This piece endures for its psychological depth—Degas's women often appear absorbed, almost unaware of the viewer—and its innovative perspective, drawing from photography and Japanese prints. A testament to Degas's evolving style, *The Millinery Shop* invites visitors to ponder the quiet elegance of daily rituals in a rapidly modernizing world.

About the Artist

Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas · 1834–1917

Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas, born on July 19, 1834, in Paris to a prosperous banking family, was the eldest of five children. His mother, Célestine Musson, a Creole from New Orleans whose father Germain Musson had roots in Haiti, died when Degas was thirteen, leaving his father Augustin and unmarried uncles to guide him. Educated at the elite Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he earned a baccalauréat in...