A Tale of Two Portraits: Degas and the Anatomy of Family Life
Edgar Degas, The Bellelli Family, 1858–67, oil on canvas, 200 x 250 cm. Paris, Musée d’Orsay
“Happy families are all alike,” Leo Tolstoy once wrote, but “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Perhaps no painter felt this more deeply than Edgar Degas. Though remembered for his depictions of ballerinas and laundresses, Degas captured modern life in all its manifestations. From boudoir scenes to brothel monotypes (a type of one-of-a-kind print), he dove into the depths of Parisian existence. His oeuvre—his body of work– captured its rawness like never before. Instead of producing highly idealised scenes of allegorical and mythological significance, as his predecessors had done, Degas portrayed memories of personal truth and tribulation. One portrait after another, he exposed the psychological experience of families in the modern age, framing their unspoken struggles through clever visual and compositional choices.
In The Bellelli Family, one of his earlier works, Degas manipulates composition to portray familial estrangement, disagreement, and division. Depicting his aunt Laure, her husband Baron Bellelli, and their daughters, Giulia and Giovanna, the painting draws from lived experience. Degas had lived with the Bellellis in Florence and knew their unspoken tensions well: the Baron’s political exile and nationalistic anxieties; Laure’s mourning of her father, Hilaire; and the children’s discomfort with their parents’ growing rift. While none of this is directly stated, it’s all but revealed through Degas’ compositional strategy.
Take his portrayal of Baron Gennaro Bellelli. In contrast with the three women, he turns his back to the viewer. This can be read as a sign of shame—in the aftermath of his banishment, he has turned away from his Neapolitan past, focusing instead on his political writings, symbolised by the scattered papers to his left. But this spatial separation also suggests emotional distance. The Baron faces away from his wife and daughters, thereby cast as an outsider to a tightly-knit matriarchal trio. Barriers, whether physical or psychological, prevent him from joining in, as expressed through the vertical line formed by the leg of the table, the left corner of the fireplace, and the frame of the mirror. He simply does not belong.
Laure seems to be consciously reinforcing this distance. Her expression is key to this reading. Somber yet dignified, it allows Degas to channel his interest in physiognomy—his belief that character can be read through appearance—directly into the composition, using Laure’s face to suggest her inner strength and emotional restraint.
Poised in a dignified three-quarter view—an echo of the Renaissance portraiture Degas saw at the Uffizi—she radiates composure, coldness, and stoic authority. Her black clothing fortifies her sternness, whilst also denoting the reason for it: the passing of her father, whose portrait hangs beside her and weighs on her consciousness, as do her ensuing struggles. But when it comes to current family dynamics, Laure’s gestures prove the most important. Resting one hand on Giovanna’s shoulder, and placing the other near Giulia, she creates a physical and symbolic alignment between her and her daughters. She is not just a mother with her children; she is a woman asserting her influence, authority, and control.
The girls don’t resist. Instead, they cluster on their mother’s side, compositionally, physically, and emotionally aligned with her. Giovanna mimics her mother’s restraint, foreshadowing the kind of woman she will become. Even the seated Giulia, who leans toward Laure but glances toward her father, ultimately turns away from him. The balance of power is obvious. Privy to all this drama, Degas places the viewer in his own shoes; we thus become an intimate observer, having just walked into the room, unwittingly attuned to the private dramas of an otherwise public family.
Edgar Degas, Henri Degas and His Niece, Lucie Degas, c. 1875-6, oil on canvas, 99.8 x 119.9 cm. Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago
Similar tensions surface in Henri Degas and His Niece, Lucie Degas (1886). Here, Degas confines his uncle and young cousin in a cramped domestic interior, likely Henri’s Parisian apartment. Viewers are denied contextual detail; instead, their focus is drawn to the figures themselves. Leaning back, both uncle and niece wear black clothing and weary expressions. This not only creates a visual link between them but also signals the root of their connection: death. Having lost her parents and, subsequently, her last guardian, Achille Degas, Lucie fell into Henri’s care. It was this turn in life that pushed them into the corner of a tiny apartment—just as Degas does compositionally—and created a sense of psychological entrapment.
As a result, Henri had to abandon his masculine, bachelor preoccupations—embodied by the newspaper he no longer reads—and redirect his attention to family matters, like Degas’ implied entrance into the room and Lucie’s hovering presence. Henri’s hesitant guardianship and Lucie’s cautious dependence unfold in their tentative gestures, betraying a bond shaped less by choice than by circumstance. Their psychological divide is further amplified by the contrast between the dark door behind Henri and the yellowed wall behind Lucie; their mental frames are clearly different. Through such careful compositional orchestration, Degas has once again uncovered a family’s private struggles, staging a domestic drama that is immediate, elusive, and unresolvable.
Even when Degas mastered the art of depicting women in intimate, private interiors, his artistic and psychological astuteness shines through most vividly in his family portraits. Not only do these works reveal an often overlooked side of modernity, namely, the private dramas experienced by family members; but they become a masterclass in the subtle use of gesture, expression, setting, and prop to weave a silent story of struggle, sadness, and circumstance. Through works like The Bellelli Family and Henri Degas and His Niece, Lucie, Degas emerges as more than a talented draughtsman and painter. He establishes himself as an astute observer of human nature, capable of placing his brush on the human soul and embedding it within the frame. He proves he, like the best writers of his time, can capture something enduring, even amid the tides of modernisation: the complex, often unspoken weight of family.