Singer with a Glove

By the late 1870s Paris had a cheap new nightlife: the café-concert, open-air cabarets along the Champs-Élysées where a singer worked a rowdy crowd for a few coins under the gaslight. Degas went often, especially to the Ambassadeurs, and drew from a seat close to the stage. Here he catches one performer mid-note, her mouth open, her black-gloved hand raised in front of her face. That gesture was part of the act, since singers used their arms and hands to push a song to the back rows, and Degas builds the whole pastel around it. Behind her the footlights smear into streaks of orange, green and pale yellow, the colours of stage light rather than daylight. He worked this in pastel, a chalk he could push fast and layer, which suited a scene he had only seconds to fix. It came to Harvard in 1951 from the collector Maurice Wertheim.