The Millinery Shop

A young woman sits in a hat shop, bent over a wide-brimmed hat that she holds and studies closely. She wears a green wool dress and long, elegant gloves. This is an oil painting on canvas, about a metre tall and a little wider, so it is a fairly large work. Degas made it between 1879 and 1886. It is the biggest of his paintings about milliners, which is another word for hatmakers. Notice how closely the woman fills the scene, as though we have stepped into the shop and caught her at work.

Start with the woman's clothing. Her green wool dress looks fine enough for a wealthy customer, and her long gloves seem just as refined. Then look at the hat with green trimmings near her head. From where we stand, it seems to sit right on top of her, as if she were wearing it. Yet she is really holding it in front of her. This small trick of placement is easy to miss, so look at how the hat and her head line up.

Degas did not paint this scene in a hurry. He arranged the composition carefully and made several drawings and pastels of the lone figure first. Pastels are drawings made with soft colored chalk sticks. In these studies he perfected the woman's pose and tried out different outfits for her. The finished painting, dated 1879 to 1886, grew out of all that preparation. It is the largest of his milliner paintings, which suggests how much this subject mattered to him.

In late nineteenth-century France, the line between classes had become hard to read. Millinery was then thought a prestigious trade, one that needed skill and taste, and it could lift young women who did well at it. Degas shows this shift through her clothes. Her dress and gloves could belong to either a rich client or a shop employee. But she wears no hat of her own, which a high-class young lady would have been expected to wear. Look once more at the hat that seems to crown her, and ask which of the two she is.