Die Unterhaltung

Three fashionable women in a milliner's shop, two leaning over a table, one gazing out of the window. The title says Conversation, yet nobody speaks. Degas's pastel became the first of his works to enter a German museum.

The story behind the painting

Degas made this pastel on card, 65 by 86 cm, around 1882, when he created a group of works showing women in a milliner's shop. Its French title, La conversation chez la modiste, points to that setting, though here the hats on stands that mark the shop in other pictures are missing. Degas sold it to Paul Durand-Ruel in April 1885. The critic Théodore Duret then owned it and put it up for auction in Paris in 1894, which angered Degas, who had thought of Duret as a friend.

What to look for

A wide table runs diagonally from the lower right corner into the middle, covered with a colourful rug of blurred lines and ornaments. The woman at the front leans on both forearms, her head hidden by a broad hat. Behind her, a second woman rests her chin on her hand; she is the only one whose face can partly be seen, in profile, very pale under the brim of a red hat, perhaps looking at a blue paper that may be a letter. The third, seen against the light, turns away to the window. The palette seems sparse but holds many nuances, and Degas visibly alternated brush and chalk.

Meaning and intent

Hugo von Tschudi, who bought it for Berlin, wrote that everything expresses the weariness of waiting, and found the title not without irony. More than a century later Claude Keisch agreed, seeing a strange failure of all communication and calling the asymmetric composition awkward, while Josef Kern linked its cropped figures to Japanese art. Degas often titled works Conversation where talk had paused or ended. The writer Jane Munro saw here a quiet tête-à-tête among friends, and such silent closeness can also read as familiarity and affection.

Legacy

After the 1894 auction Durand-Ruel bought the pastel again. In 1896 Hugo von Tschudi, the new director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, came to Paris with the painter Max Liebermann to choose contemporary French art, and the pastel joined the collection that year. It was the first work by Degas to reach a German museum. Signed Degas at lower right but not dated, it remains in Berlin, in the Alte Nationalgalerie.