The Bellelli Family

Degas painted this in his early twenties, staying with relatives in Florence, where his uncle Gennaro Bellelli was living in political exile. Gennaro had backed the fight for Italian independence and had been chased out of Naples for it. You can feel the strain of that household in the room. Degas puts his aunt Laura and her two daughters on one side, in black, and pushes Gennaro off to the right, turned away in his chair, cut off from the others. Laura was pregnant here, and unhappy. She wrote to Degas that living with her husband would drive her to the grave. Look at the small framed drawing on the wall behind her. That is a portrait of her father, Degas's grandfather, who had just died. The black dresses are mourning for him.