Portrait de Rose Caron

On 16 May 1892 the Paris Opéra finally staged Reyer's Salammbô, with Rose Caron in the title role she had created in Brussels two years earlier. Degas was 57 or 58 and at the Opéra several nights a week, and he knew Caron well enough to paint her away from the stage. He shows her in a dark hat, drawing a long glove up her forearm, the ordinary business of getting ready to go out or to go on. It was her long arms he was drawn to, and he built the whole picture on that one gesture, cutting the figure off at the edges and looking slightly down at her, the sort of framing he had been taking from Japanese prints since the 1870s.