Degas's Father Listening to Lorenzo Pagans Playing the Guitar

This intimate double portrait from around 1870, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, depicts Degas's father Auguste listening intently while the Spanish tenor Lorenzo Pagans plays guitar. Pagans was a popular performer in Parisian musical salons, and this painting records a specific form of bourgeois leisure — the private salon musicale — that was central to cultivated Parisian social life. It also reveals the deep affection Degas had for his father, who died in 1874, after which Degas was left with substantial debts that shaped the rest of his life. The two figures are united in concentrated listening, their relationship rendered with unusual intimacy.

Degas uses a warm, intimate palette of ochres and deep browns to evoke the candlelit salon atmosphere. Pagans and Auguste Degas are painted in close proximity, their faces turned toward each other or inward, creating a psychological bond. The guitar provides a diagonal accent and textural contrast to the faces.