After making the majority of his paintings and experimenting with pastel and monotype, Degas briefly turned to photography in late 1895. Friends described him as "ablaze with enthusiasm" as he enlisted them as models and appropriated their living rooms as his after-dinner photographic studio. Both the activity and the resulting images bound Degas to his circle of close friends and brought comfort in the evening hours, when he otherwise dwelled on his own mortality and the recent deaths of his brother Achille and sister Marguerite.

One December evening, in the company of Auguste Renoir and Stéphane Mallarmé, Degas photographed Mallarmé's daughter Geneviève and "the little Manet girls"—Julie Manet (the seventeen-year-old daughter of Berthe Morisot and Édouard Manet's brother Eugène) and her cousins Paule and Jeannie Gobillard, all three of them orphans whom the elder artists had taken under their wing. Sitting before Degas, whose camera is reflected in the mirror, the young women are joined to one another by the continuous blackness of their dresses, a backdrop for the gentle rhythm of their hands.

Degas never exhibited his photographs publicly, preferring instead to keep them a part of the private realm in which they were made; he gave this tender picture to Julie Manet.