The 1860s are an important transitional phase in Degas’s development. He created magnificent history paintings and most of his exquisite portraits in that period. Degas also started painting racetracks scenes and jockeys, a novel and modern subject even though inspired by Gustave Moreau. It was the only modern subject Degas treated until the 1870s. The present drawing owes its importance to the glimpse it gives at Degas’s later interest in modern, urban themes, especially his concern with recording lower class women as tragic, contemporary heroines. This fascination was completely novel in art but paralleled in the novels by Emile Zola and the Goncourt brothers. From circa 1870 onwards laundresses, ballet dancers and other vulnerable categories of women enriched Degas’s imagery. Although Degas remained an observer and his depictions at first sight seem somewhat unaffected the artist was by no means psychologically detached from his motifs. It is known that Degas, a bachelor all of his life who never had an affair with a woman, spent a lot of time with the ballet dancers and with laundry girls. He made their world his own.

‘Femme debout’ has been linked to a group of studies for one of Degas’s most important and most mysterious works, Interior, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This painting is traditionally known as ‘The Rape’. Although the exact subject of this masterpiece - dated to 1868/69 - is not known and Degas according to period sources himself called it simply ‘my genre picture’, it nonetheless seems certain that the man in this genre scene is an intruder. And the girl, who has her back defensively turned to the young gentleman, sits quietly crying, as though she has been affronted. Details such as the opened box on the table, a time-honoured symbol of lost virginity, corroborate this interpretation, as do the corset lying on the floor and the man’s clothing strewn about. If our ‘femme debout’ is a preparatory study, it sheds new light on the initial plan of one of Degas’s most controversial interpretations of a modern subject and one of the very few large-scale painted scenes in which a tragic confrontation is forged between a high class exponent – the bourgeois gentleman – and a powerless, lower class girl. The drawing informs that Degas intended to show movement and planning to represent the moment of the violence. The girl’s face clearly shows a sudden and strong emotional strain; agony. Her mouth is opened as if she cries. The position of her arms seems to reproduce an uncontrolled movement, which would be the case if the girl was resisting. Only the hand of her right arm is shown, but it is not worked-out; merely indicated. Surely this hand was not meant to hold or grab something. It is a loose swinging hand attached to a pending arm. Brushstrokes show that Degas envisaged an arm pending downwards. But he was not satisfied with this detail. By slightly bowing the arm into a diagonal direction the artist not only enhanced the idea of movement but now also shows the girl as not keeping her balance. The brushstrokes of the other arm show that Degas had planned to give her a raised left arm as if she is warding off someone. The girl in our drawing wears a similar gown as the female figure in the Philadelphia painting. All these observations strengthen the assumption that the present drawing is a preparatory work for that painting. In that case it would constitute a highly informative document. If Degas would have gone through with executing the painting according to his initial idea, one wonders how big the shock would have been with the public and the critics in particular. But it did not come that far. Interestingly, Degas did receive advice in a later stage, when the painting was well underway to completion, from a source yet to be identified (possibly the painter James Tissot), which was clearly concerned with enhancing the sense of mystery and to make some shocking details less conspicuous. It is likely that Degas received guidelines from the beginning and that he accordingly gradually changed the whole ‘mise en scène’.

If ‘Interior’ shows Degas on the threshold to a revolutionary chapter in his career, the present drawing implies that in his mind he had already crossed that border. The Impressionists were innovative in their technique, but their practice to paint directly excluded the possibility of scrutinizing the lives of simple folk at close range and to imbue scenes with irony or charge it with a subtle message like Degas did. Degas on the contrary shifted his artistic focus to the preparatory phase itself. Thus the present drawing assumes a new meaning. It shows Degas’s first ideas which he later allowed to be absorbed in the Philadelphia painting.

The present ‘femme debout’ is a haunting image. It shows a suffering woman, who nevertheless stands up and faces whatever threatens her. Ingres’s advice to Degas, during their brief meeting, to draw lines was something he would never fail to put into practice. Our drawing reveals the artist’s brilliant command of the brush. The strokes are indeed mostly linearly conceived and conjure a perfectly natural image of a young girl in a gown which slips down and reveals a naked shoulder.

The provenance of our Degas lists eminent art lovers. The first recorded owner was Woldemar von Seidlitz, one of the most influential art historians of his generation. He was director of the museum in Dresden from 1884 to 1919 and is also remembered for his pioneering monographs on Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci. Von Seidlitz changed the face of art history by promoting sound scholarship and museum training, and for this role is often mentioned in one breath with scholars and museum directors such as Wilhelm von Bode, Alfred Lichtwark and Karl Woermann. The next owner was the famous collector and entrepreneur Otto Gerstenberg, who made Victoria, which still exists, the leading insurance company in Germany and furthermore introduced many reforms in the national insurance system in his country. He only began collecting seriously in his forties but then quickly became a leading collector. He developed a very broad taste. His collection ranged from Japanese prints to European Old Master Painting. The core however was formed by French art from the Romantic era to the Impressionists. As his collection grew he began to sell some his works on paper and this occasioned the purchase of our Degas by the New York dealer Richard Zinser. Walter Bareiss (born Tübingen, 1919), the last owner of our sheet, is one the greatest collectors of our age. From the outset his artistic interest was all-round. He started collecting as a teenager, his first purchase a Picasso etching. Soon he began collecting Japanese woodcuts, Chinese ceramic, Greek ancient vases and modern art. Much of his collections of African and Contemporary art found a home in leading museums throughout the United States. At its peak his collection counted circa 9.000 objects. Bareiss was also briefly interim director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He died this year, 2007.

Edgar Degas was born under the full name Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas, as the eldest son into a prominent banking family. At nineteen he started studying law but soon chose to pursue an artistic career. He began his training by copying Old Masters in the Louvre. In 1854, he entered the studio of Louis Lamothe. In 1855/56, he took lessons at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and from 1856 to 1861 he was in Italy, staying with family and again studying Old Masters. Back in France in 1861, he met with Edouard Manet and through him came into contact with the future Impressionists, who often came together in the Parisian Café Guérbois. Up to 1865, he mostly painted history pieces. In the following period, however, he concentrated on portraiture and racing scenes with horses. Around 1870, the themes of opera and other aspects of modern urban life were introduced into his oeuvre. Degas continued to broaden his scope of realistic subject matter. Although Degas participated in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions no-one, including himself, regarded him as an Impressionist. Degas saw himself as a ‘Realist’. He passionately experimented with the technical possibilities the different media offered. The broad scope of his artistic skills is reflected in the numerous techniques which he practised: Degas was not only a painter, but also a draughtsman, a pastellist, a photographer, an engraver and a sculptor. Except for a short period in the mid 1870s, Degas never endured financial hardship. The renown and success that rapidly increased from the 1880s allowed him even more artistic freedom.