Portraits At The Stock Exchange

This study for an oil painting by Degas of 1878-79 (Musee d'Orsay, Paris) depicts the financier and collector Ernest May (1845-1925) under the portico of the Paris stock exchange. At the time, May was in his early thirties and just beginning to expand his acquisitions from old master and eighteenth-century pictures to works by Degas, Manet, and their colleagues.