Un café, boulevard Montmartre

Degas showed this at the Impressionist exhibition of 1877, and it is pure modern Paris at night. Under the gas lamps of the boulevard Montmartre, several women sit at the outdoor tables of a cafe, waiting, one making a dismissive flick of her thumb against her teeth. Viewers at the time would have read them at once as prostitutes taking the evening air, the sort of unsentimental city scene Degas preferred to pretty landscape. He made it in pastel worked over a monotype, a printed base he then drew back into with chalky colour, which lets the lamplight smoke and blur. The pillars of the cafe front slice the row of women into separate framed compartments, so we seem to glide past them the way a stroller would. It came from the collection of his friend, the painter Gustave Caillebotte.