Executed circa 1879. 

This lively brothel scene is one of a series of monotypes made by Degas which he sold to Ambroise Vollard, usually in exchange for works he wished to buy from the dealer.  Degas, a voracious collector, began by buying works by Manet from a delighted Vollard, and soon expanded to exchanging his own works for those of other artists represented by the dealer.  After Degas’s estate sale in 1918, Vollard arranged that the present work be included with a number of other monotypes in the Guy de Maupassant novel La Maison Tellier, about life in a contemporary brothel. 

While Degas had maintained a long relationship with the dealer Durand-Ruel, works such as this (of a much more scandalous subject matter) were often rejected by the more cautious dealer, and gave Vollard an opening to represent Degas.  As Mary Cassatt described their relationship in 1913: “[Paul Durand Ruel] would not buy the things from Degas that Vollard gladly took and sold again at large profits.  Vollard is a genius in his line he seems to be able to sell anything.”(as quoted in Rabinow, ed., Cezanne to Picasso, Amboise Vollard, Patron of the Avant Garde, p. 151).  The brothel scenes were admired for their intimate honesty from early on, and Renoir also owned one.  Vollard later recalled Renoir’s high praise for another work from the same group of monotypes: “any treatment of such subjects is likely to be pornographic, and there is always a desperate sadness about them.  It took Degas to give to the Name Day of the Madam an air of joyfulness, and at the same time the greatness of an Egyptian bas-relief”(as quoted in Rabinow, ed., Cezanne to Picasso, Amboise Vollard, Patron of the Avant Garde, p. 152).  The present work was made in two versions, and Pablo Picasso at one time owned the second.  The series, of which he owned a number of examples, affected him deeply and he compared the power of Degas’ monotypes to the drawings of Rembrandt (Hélène Seckel-Klein, Picasso Collectioneur, Paris, 1998, p. 111).  In 1971, Picasso made a series of etchings which incorporꦗated images of Degas in a brothel setting; he titled several in the series as an homage to the earlier wokrs of th🎉e master: “Maison Tellier”.

Edgar Degas, Sur le Lit, monotype, 1879, Collection of Pablo Pi🍃casso