Interior

Degas is remembered for ballet dancers and racehorses, so this one tends to stop people. He painted it around 1868, and it reads like the tensest scene in a play. A lamp throws hard light across a small bedroom. A woman in a white slip turns away toward the wall, a man stands blocking the door with his hands in his pockets, and between them the room is full of small charged details, an open sewing box, a discarded corset on the floor. Degas himself called it his genre painting and left the story deliberately unresolved. Later scholars tied it to a scene in a Zola novel, though the picture never quite fits any single tale. He noted to himself around this time to keep working on the effects of lamplight, not the lamp but what it does to a room, and you can see him testing exactly that here.