Place de la Concorde
The Place de la Concorde in Paris, crossed by Ludovic Lepic and his daughters — the great square is unchanged.
rue de Rivoli
The painting shows a real, identified place that you can find today. The exact spot the artist worked from is not necessarily known.
Place de la Concorde — at a glance
- Artist
- Edgar Degas (1834–1917)
- Year
- c. 1875
- Movement
- Impressionism / Realism
- Place
- Place de la Concorde, Paris, at the edge of the Tuileries
- Viewpoint
- The edge of the great square — square and balustrade unchanged
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Now at
- State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Overview
Place de la Concorde is a portrait-in-a-city-square by Edgar Degas, painted about 1875. It shows Degas's friend the printmaker Vicomte Ludovic Lepic strolling across the great Paris square with a cigar, his two young daughters in fur-trimmed coats, and his greyhound. It is oil on canvas and hangs in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.
Long thought lost — it disappeared from Germany after the Second World War — it re-emerged in the Hermitage, which put it on public display in the 1990s.
Where was Place de la Concorde painted?
Museum interpretation The Place de la Concorde is the largest square in Paris, between the Champs-Élysées and the Tuileries. Degas sets the group at its edge, with the low balustrade and statuary of the Tuileries garden and a distant view along the square behind them; a single cropped figure stands at the left. The square, the balustrade and the sightlines are unchanged.
What is in the painting?
Lepic walks left to right, umbrella under his arm, looking away to the right. His daughters face in two different directions, one almost with her back to us; the greyhound crosses low in the foreground. The space around and between the figures is wide and empty, and a man at the far left is sliced by the frame.
Look closely
Vicomte Lepic
The printmaker friend of Degas, walking across with a cigar and an umbrella under his arm, looking off to the right.
The two daughters
In fur-trimmed coats, facing in different directions — one nearly turned away from the viewer.
The greyhound
Crosses low through the foreground, nose down.
The cropped man at the left
A figure sliced by the picture's edge — the ‘accidental’ framing Degas wanted.
Analysis
Composition & perspective
Bold empty space, figures scattered and facing different ways, and hard cropping at the edges — a snapshot before snapshots.
Scholarship Degas leaves the centre of the canvas almost bare, pushes the figures to the sides, has them all look in different directions, and cuts the man at the left in half. The effect is of a moment caught by accident, years before instantaneous photography could actually do it.
History & provenance
The painting was in a Berlin collection before the war, was taken to the Soviet Union in 1945, and is now in the Hermitage, St Petersburg, where it has been shown since the mid-1990s.
Sources
- State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg — collection entry for Edgar Degas, ‘Place de la Concorde (Vicomte Lepic and His Daughters)’ (c. 1875; oil on canvas)
- Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., ‘Degas’ (Metropolitan Museum of Art / Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 1988)
Related paintings
More by Edgar Degas
L'Absinthe
A Cotton Office in New Orleans
Young Spartans Exercising
