Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli

The woman is Degas's sister Thérèse, and the man next to her is her husband Edmondo Morbilli, who was also her first cousin. They married in 1863 and settled in Naples, where the family had money and relations. The painter's grandfather had fled revolutionary France as a young man and built a bank there. By the time this was painted, around 1865, the Naples the couple lived in was no longer a capital city. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had been absorbed into the new Italy in 1861, and the Morbilli, minor Neapolitan nobility, were left in a town that had lost its court. Degas kept the picture to the end of his life. It went to a niece in Nice, and in 1932 the American collector Chester Dale bought it through the dealer Paul Rosenberg.