Edgar Degas, The Millinery Shop, 1879-84

In The Millinery Shop, Edgar Degas looks through a window at a young girl busy at work. Just like his other paintings of dancers, jockeys and laundresses, Degas gazes into the world of an average person doing an extraordinary thing: living life. Both Degas and his subject become fully invested in their artistic job.

Between the 1860s and 1890s Paris was facing a financial crisis in part due to the Franco-Prussian War. The sinking popularity of small specialty shops to larger mall-type stores caused millinery shops such as these to shut down. This large period of change transformed Paris into what it is today, even going from 12 to 20 arrondisements. Leading up to La Belle Epoque was full of demolition as seen in photos by Charles Marville and reconstruction.

Setting up the scene for Degas's Millinery Shop, X-rays show that Degas had first starting painting the girl as a fancy dressed customer. By, instead, setting the girl as a working class hat maker with pride, Degas shows the pride in the progress of Paris, and it doesn't hurt to say that Degas thought that hats were the utmost sign of the bourgeois woman. The making of hats for the bourgeois in a failing economy shares a unity between the past and the future. Like both Paris and the painting, what was once all egocentricity, becomes "creation and consumption."

By the 1870s, Degas's eyesight began to fail him, and he used more pastels. He did a series of millinery and jockey paintings, but this one gained the most recognition. The two contrasting sides, the finished hats on display and the girls unfinished work, have a beautiful flow of progress. In The Millinery Shop, Degas scraped and repainted the girls hand and hat-in-the-making multiple times to put it in motion. Sort of like the painting, neither piece of work gets completely finished.