Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli

Degas painted his sister Thérèse and her husband twice around 1865, on canvases of almost the same size. She had married Edmondo Morbilli, her first cousin, in Naples in 1863. The De Gas family had a bank in that city, and the two households had been close for a generation. The other version, now in Washington, sets the couple on a sofa and stayed unfinished in his studio. This one is closer and tighter. Thérèse sits partly behind her husband, one hand on his shoulder and the other raised to her face, while Edmondo, broad and dark in the foreground, throws a shadow across her cheek. His tie picks up the colour of her dress. 1865 was also the year Degas first got into the Salon, with a medieval battle scene he never followed up on. The canvas came to Boston in 1931, a gift from the collector Robert Treat Paine, who had bought it in New York the year before.