The Halévy Family

In the autumn of 1897 Edgar Degas, a friend of the Halévys for decades, sat silent at their dinner table while they talked about the Dreyfus Affair, then left and never came back. The family had taken the side of Dreyfus, the Jewish officer wrongly convicted of treason. Degas had not. Two years earlier he had photographed Louise Halévy, the woman in black here, and the museum notes that Blanche gives her the same kind, slightly disenchanted face.

Blanche painted this group in 1903, probably at the family's country house at Sucy-en-Brie, outside Paris. Louise's husband, the writer Ludovic Halévy, is absent. Her elder son Élie, a philosopher and historian of England, stands behind. His wife Florence, married in 1901, leans towards the needlework on her mother-in-law's lap, whose blue scrolls return in the armchair upholstery.