Le Comte Lepic et ses filles

Degas painted his friend Ludovic Lepic around 1871, in a Paris just emerging from the Prussian siege and the violent months of the Commune. Lepic was an aristocrat, an amateur printmaker, and the man who introduced Degas to the monotype, and here he crosses an open square with his two young daughters and a dog. Degas frames it like a snapshot caught in passing: the girls face opposite ways, a stranger is sliced off at the left edge, and much of the canvas is simply empty ground. That off-balance, unposed look owed a good deal to the Japanese prints he collected. The painting later hung in a private Zurich foundation, from which armed thieves snatched it in 2008, and it was recovered, with minor damage, four years later.