Getty Museum

Brothel Scene

Creator

French Photographer · 1834–1917

Artist

> No art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament . . . I know nothing. > > --Edgar Germaine Hilaire Degas From a wealthy Parisian family, Degas devoted himself exclusively to painting without needing to sell a canvas. His training was conventional: he spent five years in Italy, studied the O

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Object Description · Getty Museum

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.

Getty Museum’s catalogue record

produced_by.carried_out_by[0].id: https://data.getty.edu/museum/collection/person/8b37c957-95e3-4a45-b819-50e0bcc226d8
Artist/Maker: Edgar Degas
subject_of[Homepage].id: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/108E1Z
Date: about 1877
Culture: French
Object Type: Drawing

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Object ID: 5e15c244-4f8e-4a90-bcba-c34888a9ffb8
Object Type: Drawing
Getty Museum field “Object Type” · copied as is
Creator: Edgar Degas
Getty Museum field “Artist/Maker” · copied as is
Culture: French
Getty Museum field “Culture” · copied as is
Department: Drawings
Getty Museum field “Department” · derived by LinkedCulture from the museum field · Getty's classification category is stored as department.
Credit Line: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Getty Museum field “Standard Credit Line” · the first available of several museum fields
Getty Museum field “Source Credit Line” · the first available of several museum fields
Date: about 1877
Getty Museum field “Date” · copied as is
Begin Year: 1877
Getty Museum field “produced_by.timespan.begin_of_the_begin” · derived by LinkedCulture from the museum field
End Year: 1877
Getty Museum field “produced_by.timespan.end_of_the_end” · derived by LinkedCulture from the museum field

The museum’s own record has not been captured for this object yet, so the museum fields shown above are limited to values LinkedCulture stored unchanged.

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