Portraits at the Stock Exchange

Heads bent close together, the financier Ernest May and his associates examine documents amid the bustle of the Paris stock exchange, the scene cropped and crowded like a snapshot of modern commerce. Degas, ever the observer of contemporary life, turns from dancers and cafes to the world of finance, catching the gestures and glances of men absorbed in business. Now in the Musee d'Orsay, Portraits at the Stock Exchange is an unusual record of the bourgeois economic life of his day, rendered with his characteristic candid, off-balance framing and sharp eye for telling gesture.