His nieces Giovanna and Giulia Bellelli turn from one another without the slightest trace of sisterly intimacy or affection. Grimmest of all is the portrait of his aunt, the Duchess of Montejasi Cicerale, and her two daughters in which the implacable old woman seems to be separated from her offspring by an unbridgeable physical and psychological gulf.

 

The theme of tension and hostility between the sexes underlies many of Degas’ most ambitious works of the 1860s, both in genre-like depictions of modern life such as Pouting (p.10) and Interior (p.13) (formerly known as The Rape and probably inspired by Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin) and in elaborate historical scenes such as Young Spartan Girls Challenging the Boys (p.16-17) and Scene of War in the Middle Ages (p.14). This last - the most lurid and sensational picture Degas ever painted - shows horsemen shooting arrows at a group of nude women. The women’s bodies show no wounds or blood, but fall in poses suggestive more of erotic frenzy than of the agony of death. From the time that Degas reached maturity as an artist in the 1870s, most of his depictions of women - apart from a few middle-class portraits - include more than a suggestion that the women are prostitutes. Prostitution in nineteenth-century Paris took a wide variety of forms, from the bedraggled street-walker desperate for a meal to the 'Grande Horizontale' able to charge a fortune for her favours. Virtually any woman who had to go out to work and earn a living was regarded as also liable to sell her body. So it was that Degas’ depictions of singers, dancers, circus performers and even milliners and laundresses could have disreputable connotations for his contemporaries that might not always be apparent today.

 

It was during the Second Empire (from 1852 to 1871) that Paris consolidated its reputation as the pleasure capital of Europe. That ‘love for sale’ was one of the chief attractions of Paris for foreign visitors is made abundantly clear by the operetta La Vie Parisienne composed by Jacques Offenbach for the 1867 Paris World Exhibition. The libretto, written by Degas’ close friend Ludovic Halévy and his collaborator Henri Meilhac, shamelessly celebrates Paris’ reputation as ‘the modern Babylon’ and a great focus for venal love.

 

Amongst the characters are a 'Grande Horizontale' with the outrageously punning name of Métella (roughly translatable as ‘put it in’), a pretty glove-maker called Gabrielle who might have stepped from one of Degas’ pastels of milliners, a Brazilian millionaire who wants to lose his fortune to Parisian ‘hussies’, a Swedish Baroness who longs to hear the singer Thérésa (about whom we shall hear more later) and her husband who wants to experience and enjoy everything at once ‘jusque-là!’