La Saboyana

In 1860 Savoy voted to leave the Kingdom of Sardinia and join France, and the mountain region between the Alps and Italy became French almost overnight. That same year the young Degas painted this girl from Savoy in her regional dress. Women in local costume were a stock subject for other 19th-century painters, yet they are rare in Degas, who would spend his career on dancers, laundresses and racehorses instead. He was still in his twenties here, decades before the pastels that made him famous. The picture is now in the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.