From Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City: This study for an oil painting by Degas of 1878–79 (Musée 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.
