Degas's Father Listening to Lorenzo Pagans Playing the Guitar

Once a week the painter's father, Auguste De Gas, a Paris banker and a passionate amateur of music, filled his home with it. Friends took turns at the piano, and the Spanish-born tenor Lorenzo Pagans, who had made his name in the salons of the 1860s singing the songs of his own country, came and sang to the guitar. Degas painted the two men together twice in those years, and this version is dated to somewhere between about 1869 and 1872. Here the singer is pushed to the left edge, in profile and partly in shadow, and the light goes to the old man. He sits bent forward, listening, his head framed by a sheet of music open on the piano behind him. The Museum of Fine Arts credits this father with giving his son his love of music. In 2022 the museum sold digital tokens of some of its fragile pastels to pay for cleaning this canvas, and early the next year it took visitors into its conservation studio to see the painting midway through the work.