Self-portrait

Edgar Degas was about 23 when he made this, long before the ballet dancers and racehorses that made his name. In the late 1850s he had gone to Italy, where he had relatives, to study the Renaissance masters at first hand and to teach himself etching. He drew and painted himself again and again in these years, a serious, watchful young man taking his own measure. There is nothing yet of the modern Paris he would later chronicle. He works in oil on paper, later laid down on canvas, in the sober browns and blacks of the old-master portraits he was copying in Rome and Florence.