Edgar Degas

Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery, 1857. Edgar Degas. Soft ground, drypoint, aquatint, and etching. Rogers Fund, 1919.
Among the most technically complex of Degas' prints, this view of Mary Cassatt and her sister in the galleries of the Musée du Louvre was intended, like Pissarro's Wooded Landscape at L'Hermitage, Pontoise (21.46.1), to appear in the first issue of the prospective journal Le Jour et la Nuit, on which the two artists collaborated with Cassatt and Félix Bracquemond. The group was intent on achieving new tonal effects in their prints by innovatively working up the surfaces of etching plates, perhaps spurred by achievements in Impressionist paintings or by advances in photography.