This work, of great effort and size, initiates the series of pictures by Edgar Degas on life in fashion shops, this being the most brilliant and admirable of all. Degas occasionally accompanied the North American painter Mary Cassat to the Parisian fashion shops, discovering in la Rue Royale and la Rue de la Paix, in the interiors of the establishments, everyday scenes which had a powerful attraction for him and which he transferred to his pictures. Mary Cassat occasionally sat for him as a model, as in Chez la modiste. In the whole of this series, done in pastel, the painter showed the same attention to colour, light and subjective framing.
