Portraits at the Stock Exchange

When this went on show at the Impressionist exhibition of 1879, its subject was pointedly modern: not a garden or a dancer but the trading floor of the Paris stock exchange. The man in the top hat is Ernest May, a banker and collector who already owned the picture and admired Degas. A colleague leans in at his shoulder to read a slip of paper, close and confidential, the way business is really done. Degas builds the crowd out of cropped hats and jostling backs, so you feel packed into the corner with them. He worked the paint quickly and thinly here, closer to the loose Impressionist touch than to the tight drawing he usually trusted.