Cleveland Museum of Art

Woman in a Ruffled Cap

Edgar Degas

Date

1859–60

Medium

etching on wove paper

Department

Prints

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Although Edgar Degas is known for his depictions of modern Parisian life, early in his career the artist focused on portraiture. This etching was created after time spent closely studying the prints of Northern master Rembrandt van Rijn at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Degas emulated the elder artist’s distinctive mark making to record the likeness of this woman, whose identity is unknown today. Like many of Degas’s prints, this work was never editioned and exists in only four impressions. Early scholars believed that this print might be a portrait of Edgar Degas’s mother. Today, instead, it has been tied to a drawing of the same year that depicts a similar but unidentified woman sewing.

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