One simple question about this painting has never been settled. Is the woman at its center buying a hat, or making one?
What you're looking at
Degas painted this scene between 1879 and 1886, showing a woman turning a straw hat over in her hands while another hat, trimmed with a green ribbon and silk flowers, sits held up nearby. It's the largest of Degas's many paintings on the subject of milliners, or hatmakers, a trade he returned to repeatedly across his career.
A question Degas deliberately left unanswered
Degas made multiple drawings and pastel studies of this lone figure, carefully perfecting her pose and experimenting with her outfit before settling on the final composition. Yet even with all that preparatory work, he never gave viewers enough information to say for certain whether she's a customer trying on the shop's stock or the milliner herself, quietly inspecting her own work.
X-rays of the canvas have shown that Degas originally painted her in a more ornate hat with lace sleeves before reworking the figure into the simpler version visible today. The hats themselves are read by historians as reflecting the actual fashions of early 1880s Paris. The painting is now held by the Art Institute of Chicago, which itself notes that Degas withheld the clues that would let a viewer settle the question.
One detail to look for
Look at the sky-blue bonnet resting on the bench nearby, part of the shop's overflowing stock. Then look back at the central hat, held up by its green ribbon, and decide for yourself: customer, or milliner.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original, 100.0 x 110.7 cm. Shop the canvas print.