Na Chapelaria

In the 1880s Paris was inventing the modern shopping trip. Grand department stores had gone up near the Opera, and around the rue de la Paix a network of small millinery shops competed to sell hats to fashionable women. Degas made a whole series of pastels about that trade, and this was among the first he showed in public, at a small London exhibition in 1882. His friend, the American painter Mary Cassatt, sat as the model, trying on a hat while an assistant waits behind her. Degas places you behind the table, in the spot the shopgirl would occupy, so you look out as she did. The colours are worked up in soft pastel, layered until the ribbons and felt almost feel touchable.