Le Pédicure

Degas had family in New Orleans, on his mother's side, and in the early 1870s he spent months there among his American relatives. This quiet domestic scene comes out of that world, painted in 1873. The drowsy girl sunk into the flowered couch, having her foot tended by a chiropodist, is his young niece, about ten years old. He caught her half asleep, wrapped to the chin in white, entirely unbothered by the man at work on her toe. Degas painted it not in ordinary oils but in essence, oil paint with much of its oil pressed out, thinned and matte on paper, which lets the whole thing keep the plainness of something glimpsed rather than posed.