Art Institute of Chicago

The Millinery Shop

Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)

Date

1879-86

Medium

Oil on canvas

Culture

France

Department

Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

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, elegant gloves that were just as likely to be worn by wealthy clients as by the employees of the shop. At the time, millinery work was considered a prestigious trade that required skill and taste, incrementally elevating the young women who succeeded in the business. Degas addressed this subtle shift in the class hierarchy through the subject’s fashion: While her dress is nice enough to be worn by an affluent woman, she does not wear a hat of her own, which would have been expected of a high-class young lady. The artist portrayed this newfound uncertainty playfully by positioning the hat with green trimmings so it seems to sit atop the woman’s head.

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