Artwork · 1874 · Portrait
Melancholy
1874 · Oil on Canvas
Phillips Collection, Washington, District of Columbia
★ 4.2 editorial score
A young woman slumps back on a sofa, her shoulders hunched and her face clouded with dejection, the whole small canvas given over to a single mood of private unhappiness. Degas, the great observer of modern bodies and gestures, catches the very posture of melancholy - the inward collapse of someone lost in low spirits. Now in the Phillips Collection in Washington, this intimate study shows his gift for psychological truth, reading an entire emotional state from the slope of a back and the set of a face, sympathy rendered without sentimentality.
