Place de la Concorde

This is Ludovic Lepic, an aristocrat and printmaker Degas knew well, crossing the Place de la Concorde with his two daughters and his dog, a cigar clamped in his mouth. Degas cut the figures off at the edges and left the middle of the great square nearly empty, borrowing the offhand framing of a snapshot at a time when hand cameras were still a novelty. The picture then had a strange later life. It passed to a Berlin collector, vanished during the Second World War, and was thought destroyed for decades. It surfaced only in the 1990s in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, where it hangs today.