What can anyone tell me about Degas painting of Helene Ruoart in her fathers study?
Here’s an interesting article from The Guardian site (12 July 2002); “This is a strange portrait. It is supposed to be of Hélène Rouart, but she is utterly overwhelmed by signs of her father. She stands in his study surrounded by his art collection, posing behind his chair, which is colossal compared with her, as if behind a restraining fence. She is diminished by the imagined presence of her father, who might be just outside the room – though actually he was travelling in Venice when this was painted. Hélène has a pasty complexion, her hair is flattened, her dress encases her. She lists like a passenger on a swaying deck. This is the ailing, unhappy daughter of a 19th-century patriarch, so subjugated to the fetishised, massive presence of her father – images of his taste, his wealth – that she seems half-dead. To her left is a landscape of Naples by Corot, and lower down a drawing by Millet, and she is juxtaposed with them as another of her father’s treasures. To her right is the glas
