Most of the portraits of Degas wrote at the beginning of his creative career. At first it was portraits of his family members and self-portraits, but later he began to create portraits of his friends, who belonged mainly to the world of art, for example James Tissot, and acquaintances. Degas was never interested in custom-made portraits written for money.
Although among those who posed Degas, there were many secular ladies, he, unlike professional portrait painters, did not succumb to the temptation to portray these women in all the splendor of their outfits. Instead, he tried to convey the nature of his model as accurately as possible, as a result of which many of the women posing for him left the artist, feeling insulted.