Getty Museum

Brothel Scene

Date

about 1877

Medium

Drawing

Culture

French

Department

Drawings

Institution

Getty Museum

Stretching across two pages of his notebook, Edgar Degas sketched the interior of a brothel. While one soldier leans back in a drunken stupor, his head against the wall and legs extended, another soldier leans forward in deep discussion with a prostitute at another table. The establishment's madam watches the scene closely from a doorway on the right. Even in this quickly sketched scene, Degas draws the viewer into the drama by creating shrewdly observed characters. Fascinated by the countless gestures that revealed each individual's class and work, he produced pictures from things no painter had fully used before. Here the interlocking eyes of the prostitute and her client fill the center of the scene, contrasting with the madam's languid stare and the other soldier's relaxed position. Degas based the scene on Edmond de Goncourt's novel *La Fille Elisa* (The Girl Elisa), published in March 1877. It 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.

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