The Convalescent

Most portraits leave the studio when they are finished. This one stayed with Degas for about 15 years. He began it around 1872 and was still reworking it as late as 1887, long after the sitter had any reason to keep posing. We do not know who she was. She leans her head against the back of one hand, her eyes are red-rimmed, and the other arm hangs limp at her side, the whole figure heavy with some illness or grief the picture never names. Degas rarely finished on a first attempt, and here you sense the years of second thoughts. A convalescent is someone caught between being ill and being well, and he kept the painting in exactly that in-between state far longer than the woman herself would have needed to recover. It hangs now at the Getty in Los Angeles.