Visit to a Museum

Two women stand in a gallery hung with gilt frames, most likely in the Louvre, and one of them holds a guidebook. The Museum of Fine Arts reads their poses as interest mixed with plain tiredness, the feeling of a long day spent looking at pictures. Degas knew those rooms better than most visitors. He had registered as a copyist at the Louvre in 1853, at 18, and kept returning there all his life. From the late 1870s and through the 1880s he made a run of paintings and prints of women visiting museum galleries, and for several of them his model was his friend the American painter Mary Cassatt. The museum dates this canvas only loosely, to somewhere between about 1879 and 1890. It was still in his studio when he died. In 1964 Betty McAndrew of Wellesley lent it to the museum, and five years later she and her husband John gave it outright.