Joseph-Henri Altès (1826–1895)

In the late 1860s Degas was working his way into the world of the Paris Opera, and he kept painting its musicians before he ever turned to its dancers. Joseph-Henri Altes was the orchestra's first flautist, a player good enough to teach at the Conservatoire and to publish a flute method still used long after him. Degas caught him in strict profile, a small quiet head against a plain ground. He liked the flautist enough to paint him again around the same years, tucked into the group portrait now in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. The panel is tiny, little more than a hand's span, the kind of intimate likeness Degas made of people he actually knew.