大提琴手皮莱

Degas loved the Paris Opera, not only the dancers but the men down in the pit, and in the late 1860s he painted a run of portraits of individual orchestra musicians he knew. This is one of them: Louis-Marie Pilet, a cellist who had played in the Opera orchestra since 1852. Degas shows him with the instrument upright between his knees, caught in an ordinary working moment rather than posed for grandeur. These single portraits fed into a larger picture he made around 1870, The Orchestra of the Opera, a crowded view of the players at work, and Pilet is in that one too, seated behind the bassoonist. Both paintings now hang in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.