Plate for "Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery"

This copperplate is the matrix for one of Degas’s most celebrated prints, "Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery." It dates from his most experimental phase of intaglio printmaking around 1879 when he was collaborating with Cassatt and other Impressionist artists on a print publication. Degas based this composition on another etching, "Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery" (19.29.2). By overlapping the standing figure of Cassatt with the seated figure of her sister reading a guidebook and adding a cropped threshold to the foreground, Degas transformed the format and setting of his earlier work. The dealer and publisher Ambrose Vollard acquired a group of Degas’s cancelled etching plates from the artist prior to his death and published a posthumous edition of unknown size around 1919. The dealer Frank Perls took additional impressions from the plate in 1959.