The Collector of Prints

Degas painted this in 1866, when he was still working out how to make a portrait tell you who someone is by what surrounds them. The man leans over a portfolio, one finger holding his place, and glances up as if interrupted. The clues are pinned all around him. The prints in his hands are cheap, dated flower lithographs by Redoute, while the wall behind mixes in a fashionable little Chinese horse and scraps of Japanese fabric, the marks of a fussy, out-of-date hoarder rather than a man of real taste. There is a private joke in it, because Degas himself would grow into one of the most obsessive collectors of his age, his own rooms stacked with the work of Ingres and Delacroix.