The Millinery Shop

The Millinery Shop by Edgar Degas: The Millinery Shop is the largest of Edgar Degas’s paintings focused on milliners, or hatmakers. He arranged the composition…

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Start with iconic, modern, expressive. Look closely at the composition, color, and focal detail in this institution-verified image.

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The Millinery Shop is the largest of Edgar Degas’s paintings focused on milliners, or hatmakers. He arranged the composition carefully, making multiple drawings and pastels of the lone figure, perfecting the woman’s pose and experimenting with her outfit. The final composition highlights the visual ambiguities of class identity that arose in France in the late nineteenth century. The woman sits in a hat shop examining a wide-brimmed hat. She wears a fashionable green wool dress with long, elegant gloves that were…