About this work
The Princess stands alone against a field of antique gold floral wallpaper — Degas removed the Prince entirely from the composition, isolating her against a background of floral wallpaper that overlaps her right sleeve.
Two colours dominate: variations of a mustard or Naples yellow with a greenish tinge, which takes on an antique gold hue for the wallpaper, and variations of a grey-black for the dress and hair.
Degas retained the military style of the Princess's bodice, but the picture's flat background helps project her forward in space, an effect enhanced by the thicker paint on her face, hair and clothes.
Deep shadows sit under the eyes; her sideways glance is made less tonally intense — and so more intriguing — than in the photograph; the lips pale and sensual. Small as the canvas is — oil on canvas, measuring just 40 × 28.8 cm — the figure commands the picture plane with the blunt authority of someone accustomed to being looked at.
Degas, then still a young artist, did not paint the portrait from life. Instead, he made a partial copy of a full-length carte de visite photograph of the Princess and her husband, taken around 1867.
This is one of the first painted portraits to have been based on a photograph, and Degas makes no attempt to disguise its origin. What he did was edit ruthlessly: he deliberately simplified the paisley shawl into large spots, and reduced her tartan neck bow to plain black. The sitter was no ordinary subject. Princess Pauline was the wife of the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador at the court of Napoleon III, known as the "ambassadress of pleasure" — a glamorous figure in Parisian high society during the Second Empire, and a pioneer of fashion who promoted new styles of dress, including the crinoline.
Degas had met Manet in 1862, and the Impressionist quality of his fast but light and sure brushwork — his handling and simplifying of the subject — is fully evident here. The painting sits at the precise moment when Degas's classical training begins to crack open toward something more urgent and modern.
This is a portrait for someone who values psychological charge over decoration. Its compressed scale and near-monochrome palette — that confrontation of warm gold and cool grey-black — make it work beautifully in intimate rooms: a study, a bedroom, a narrow hallway where you pass it close. It doesn't need grand walls. The immediacy, certainty, and indeed intimacy of this portrait are absolutely arresting at any distance. For the viewer drawn to the edge between painted surface and living presence, between historical document and pure sensation, it delivers something few portraits of its era can match: the feeling that the subject has just
