NARRATOR—Degas made this early painting of a poor Italian peasant woman while in Rome. He traveled there in 1856 to study the city's collection of ancient and Renaissance art. This work stems from the vogue for sentimental scenes of Italian peasant life that had emerged among foreign visitors to the Eternal City over the course of the 19th century. Degas deviated from the
conventional treatment of this familiar theme by minimizing the element of sentimentality. In Degas’s depiction, the simply draped model, although clearly marked by the ravages of poverty and old age, retains the dignity of many of the elderly Biblical figures that Degas encountered in the Old Master paintings he was studying at this time.

Degas was the last important artist of the 19th century to make the traditional pilgrimage to Italy. Most avant-garde artists had long before rejected Italian art and turned to that of 17th-century Holland and Spain for inspiration. Degas continued to venerate the Old Masters throughout his long career. He even expressed great admiration for Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the great French Neo-Classicist—even though Ingres was widely regarded as the very embodiment of artistic conservatism.