From Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: City Degas’s images of milliners often present witty formal analogies between women and the hats they sell or admire. In this pastel the visual pun is unmistakable. Degas compares the young shopgirl—who resembles Marie van Goethem, the model for his sculpture The Little Fourteen-Year-Old-Dancer—with an inanimate hat stand in the form of a dummy's head. The bright blue eyes of the unseeing stand stare fixedly at the hat it may soon wear.
