让托、利内和莱内

Degas signed and dated this in March 1871, and the date carries weight. Paris had just endured a four-month siege by the Prussian army, its people cold and half-starved, and Degas himself had served in the National Guard defending the city. These three men, Charles Jeantaud, Pierre Linet and Édouard Lainé, were friends he knew from that guard duty. Here they are back indoors in coats and hats, three ordinary bourgeois faces at the exhausted end of the war, just as the city was tipping into the upheaval of the Commune. Jeantaud, at the left, would go on to become a pioneer of the early motor car. He bought the portrait from Degas and kept it for the rest of his life.