Kurzfassung

This paper discusses Edgar Degas’s photographic Self-Portrait with Zoé Closier as a pictorialist portrait de fidélité of the artist and his housekeeper, articulating meanings of identity, affection, and introspection, in Degas’s Aesthetic house in Paris. This paper will also consider issues of the politics of representation. This photograph is not a symmetrical portrait of social equals, but, given the politicised status of Degas’s images of working women in feminist art history, it is worth asking what we can know from this image of inequality of gender and class.