At the Milliner's

At the Milliner's, a pastel from around 1882 now at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, is one of several works on this subject Degas produced in the early 1880s — depicting women in fashionable hat shops trying on and selecting from the available millinery. The milliner's was a quintessentially modern subject: a commercial space dedicated to feminine consumption and self-fashioning, where the act of trying on a hat became a semi-public performance of identity. Mary Cassatt accompanied Degas on visits to millinery shops and painted similar subjects, creating a dialogue between their respective approaches to the same modern space. Degas typically focuses on the physical act of trying on rather than the social display.

The pastel medium allows Degas to render the varied materials of hats — silk, straw, ribbon, artificial flowers — with chromatic richness and textural specificity. He composes the scene with characteristic informality: the customer's figure often cropped or seen from the back, the hat itself becoming the visual protagonist. The milliner's hands adjusting the hat receive precise attention. The shop interior is rendered with selective precision — those elements that establish the commercial context are included, extraneous details suppressed.