Portraits at the Stock Exchange by Degas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 2023

Title: Portraits at the Stock Exchange

Artist: Edgar Degas (French, Paris 1834–1917 Paris)

Date: ca. 1878–79

Medium: Pastel on paper, pieced, and laid down on canvas

Dimensions: 28 3/8 x 22 7/8 in. (72.1 x 58.1 cm)

Classification: Drawings

Credit Line: Gift of Janice H. Levin, 1991

Accession Number: 1991.277.1


Degas presents a glimpse of the busy commerce at the Paris stock exchange. Financier and art collector Ernest May (1845–1925), wearing spectacles, receives a document for perusal, as an associate, identified as Monsieur Bolâtre, leans over his shoulder. The artist made this pastel as a study for an oil painting of 1878–79 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). At the time, May was in his early thirties, and just beginning to expand his acquisitions from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pictures to works by Degas, Manet, and their colleagues.


Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436154