Duchessa di Montejasi with Her Daughters, Elena and Camilla

In 1876 Degas was in Naples on hard business. His father had died two years earlier and left the family finances in a mess, and Edgar and his brother Achille had come south trying to raise money to cover what was owed. Naples was full of relatives. One of them was his father's sister Stefanina, the Duchessa di Montejasi, whom he called Aunt Fanny, and this portrait was a gift to her. She sits facing us in black, still and upright, with a weary, unimpressed look. Her daughters Elena and Camilla, also in mourning, are set off to the left, and Degas painted them in and then partly wiped them away, so they seem only half there beside their mother. It is the last of his large family portraits. In 2003 the Museum of Fine Arts bought it from the descendants of the Paris banker David David-Weill, who had owned it since 1923, and sold two Degas pastels of dancers and a Renoir at auction to help pay the price of about 20 million dollars.