The Bellelli Family

Why the family is in mourning

The black is mourning for Degas's grandfather, Hilaire Degas, who died in Naples on 31 August 1858. Laura Bellelli and the girls were held up in Naples by the death and only reached Florence in early November. Degas started work after they arrived.

The framed drawing on the wall behind Laura Bellelli is a portrait of that grandfather, made by Degas himself. He mounted his own small study in a gray mat and a wide gilt frame so that it reads on the wall as an old master drawing rather than as a family memento.

Gennaro Bellelli was in Florence because he could not go home. He had sat as a deputy for Salerno in the Neapolitan parliament of 1848, fled after the rising of 15 May, and was exiled in 1849. He settled in Florence in 1852 and was only able to return to Naples in July 1860, after Giuseppe Garibaldi's expedition. He became a senator of the Kingdom of Italy in January 1861 and died in 1864.

Laura Bellelli's letters to her nephew are blunt about the marriage. She called her husband's nature detestable and wrote that living with a man who had no serious occupation would put her in her grave.

How it was made

Degas reached Florence on 4 August 1858 and stayed until March 1859, living in the Bellelli apartment at 1209 Piazza Maria Antonia, now the Piazza dell'Indipendenza. He drew constantly. The Musée du Louvre's print room holds fourteen Bellelli drawings, among them separate studies of Laura Bellelli's right hand, of six women's boots, and of a chair.

One sheet carries Degas's own note on Gennaro Bellelli's coloring: white eyelashes, walnut-colored hair, reddish beard. He dated that drawing Florence, 1860, on a second visit. Another study of the baroness's hand is annotated to say that the hand makes a hollow in the linen.

There was no studio in the apartment, and the art historian Henri Loyrette argues that a canvas this size was almost certainly painted in Paris rather than Florence. A smaller pastel working-out of the composition is at Ordrupgaard in Copenhagen. Comparing it with the finished canvas shows what Degas added: the sprinkling of white flowers on the blue wall, and the doorway opening into a further room at the left.

The mirror over the fireplace reflects the drops of a chandelier, a door or window frame, and part of a painting that appears to show a racing scene. Degas did not take up racing subjects until the 1860s, which is one reason the picture is thought to have been worked on well after the Florence sittings.

What the 2022 restoration found

The canvas was restored in 2022 by the Musées d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie with the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France, paid for by the Friends of Florence. X-rays and infrared showed how much Degas changed as he went. Giovanna Bellelli's face was repositioned, the baron's chair was reworked at length, and both sisters' faces were repainted as the girls grew older.

The examination also found four large tears in the canvas, crossing Laura Bellelli's face, the clock, Giovanna's pinafore and the baron's chair. Preparatory drawing runs over the fills used to repair them, which means Degas was working on the canvas after it had been torn and mended.

How France bought it

Degas kept the painting all his life. He deposited it with the dealer Durand-Ruel in February 1913. After he died in September 1917, his studio was sold off in a series of auctions at the Galerie Georges Petit on the rue de Sèze, the first running from 6 to 8 May 1918.

The canvas was catalogued as lot 4 in that first sale but was bought before the bidding, by the Musée du Luxembourg. Henri Loyrette, working from the Durand-Ruel archive, gives the price as 300,000 francs, of which 50,000 came from the Comte and Comtesse de Fels. The asking price had been 400,000 until the painter's brother René de Gas took 100,000 off it, and 400,000 is the figure that reached the press at the time.

It moved from the Luxembourg to the Louvre in 1929, to the Jeu de Paume in 1947, and to the Musée d'Orsay when that museum opened in 1986.

Was it shown at the Salon of 1867?

The Musée d'Orsay's exhibition record lists the Salon of 1867 with the note that it was number 444 or 445. The Salon booklet for that year supports only part of that. Under DE GAS (edgard) it lists two entries, 444 and 445, both called simply portrait de famille, with no sizes and no sitters named.

Henri Loyrette argues the case from other evidence. François Thiébault-Sisson published a memory in 1918 of seeing the family portrait in Degas's studio in 1879, and the painter Jean-Jacques Henner made a remark about it that was written down in 1881. There is also a crackle in the embroidery on the table, where fresh paint was applied before the layer under it had dried. Degas wrote to the Surintendant des Beaux-Arts on 13 March 1867 asking to retouch work he had already delivered.

Other scholars are not persuaded. The catalogue raisonné hedges on both the year and the number. Theodore Reff dates the painting 1859 to 1860 and does not mention a Salon showing at all. No review of the Bellelli group from 1867 has been found.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

The room divides down the middle. Three figures in mourning black stand and sit together at the left; the father sits apart at the right, turned away. The details follow each person, the portrait on the wall that explains the black, and the dog leaving the picture.