Madame Camus

Madame Camus was the wife of the physician Dr Émile Camus, a friend of Degas, and was painted by him around 1869–1870 in a portrait that shows his experimental approach to the genre at its most refined. Degas placed Madame Camus in a rich, dark interior against deep red walls, the coloured ground marking a deliberate departure from the conventional neutral background of portrait convention. The work belongs to the sequence of domestic portraits from the late 1860s in which Degas was developing the psychologically charged, spatially unusual compositional approaches that would define his mature work.

The deep crimson background is unusual in Degas's portrait output and creates a warm, enveloping atmosphere rather than the recessive space of conventional portrait backgrounds. Madame Camus's dark costume absorbs into the crimson ground, her face and jewellery emerging as the primary luminous elements in a deliberately flattened, tonally unified composition.