The Millinery Shop

A woman examines a hat among others displayed on stands. Degas worked on this picture from the late 1870s into the mid-1880s, repeatedly refining pose and clothing. The scene lies between buying and making. Is she an affluent customer or a milliner? That uncertainty makes the shop a setting for changes in working women’s position.

The large pale hat on the left commands almost as much attention as the face. Ribbons, fabric and brim become independent pictorial forms. Degas foregrounds the commodity organising the room. A woman’s ornament first exists as someone’s work and an object for sale.

The green-trimmed hat seems to rest on her head, although it stands separately. Degas aligns object and sitter. The visual effect intensifies her ambiguous role. She appears beside something she might have made and inside an imagined customer’s appearance.

Her profile and gaze turn towards the hat in her hands. Degas made preparatory drawings and pastels to establish this figure. The scene’s concentration emerged through a long search. Carefully arranged action retains the appearance of direct observation.

A blue hat lies at the foreground edge, apart from the upright stands. Different positions reveal volumes, textures and decorations. Millinery demanded sensitivity to form and colour. Its making could offer a painter a related example of selecting materials and proportions.

Long gloves and a green dress look elegant enough for a customer. A successful shop employee could also dress this way. Late nineteenth-century millinery offered women professional skills and opportunities for social advancement. Visible signs of status became less definite.

Stands lift hats into space, presenting each for inspection. Yet the woman wears no hat herself, as a respectable visitor would generally be expected to do outside home. Details support different readings of her role instead of settling the scene completely.

This is Degas’s largest painting of millinery. Its scale gives everyday work the weight of a substantial artistic subject. The shop reveals society through objects: who makes them, tries them on and can afford them. An attractive surface becomes a place where labour and prosperity look similar.