Study for "Mme Théodore Gobillard" (née Yves Morisot)

Degas made this portrait sketch of the older sister of fellow painter Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) in the living room of the family home in Paris. Letters between the Morisot sisters and their mother recount its creation. Madame Morisot wrote to her third daughter Edma: "Do you know that Monsieur Degas is mad about Yves’s face, and that he is doing a sketch of her?... He is going to transfer onto the canvas what he did here in an album." The sitter, apparently pleased with Degas’s efforts, wrote: "The drawing that M. Degas made of me in the last two days is really very pretty, both true to life and delicate.... I doubt that he can transfer it onto the canvas without ruining it." The resulting unfinished painting (1984.76), the composition enlarged by about fifty percent, is on view in Gallery 815.

Credit: Purchase, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, David T. Schiff Gift, and Gifts in memory of Joseph Thomas, 1984