About this work
*Interior* — also known as *The Rape*, or *Le Viol* — is an oil painting on canvas painted by Degas in 1868–69. The scene is a dim bourgeois bedroom at night. A woman is seated in a posture of shame or distress, dressed in a white chemise falling off one shoulder; her cloak and scarf have been tossed across the foot of the bed, and her corset strewn on the floor. Across the room stands a man — tall, bearded, fully dressed.
Radiating suppressed anger, he leans against the door with his hands in his pockets — and disturbingly, he seems to be blocking the woman's way out, his shadow rising menacingly behind him. The two figures share no eye contact; a vast emotional gulf of dark floorboards separates them. Near the center of the canvas sits an open sewing box with a vivid red lining that catches the lamplight — the most eye-catching object in the painting, open and exposed, hinting at violated secrets, or worse.
The palette is predominantly somber and muted, setting a heavy and tense atmosphere.
Degas made his first sketch toward *Interior* on Christmas Day 1867 — and the finished work, dated 1868–69, is considered the masterpiece of his early period and the culmination of his youthful obsession with painting fraught relations between the sexes.
He painted it at a time when his growing commitment to Realism had led him away from his earlier preoccupation with historical subjects.
It is possible that Degas lifted individual elements and a general theme of confrontation from contemporary literature — and a notebook from this period reveals his intent: to "work a great deal on nocturnal effects, lamps, candles, etc.," insisting that "the fascinating thing is not always to show the source of light but rather its effect."
He made numerous preparatory studies for the room and the figures to create a powerful psychological mood, and seems to have intentionally obscured the narrative in order to seduce the viewer with the suggestive power of his painting and its unrevealed secrets.
Even the painting's title is uncertain: acquaintances referred to it as both *Le Viol* and *Intérieur*, and it was under the latter that Degas exhibited it for the first time in 1905.
Its influence has been noted in the work of Degas's protégé Walter Sickert, specifically in his *Camden Town
