Place de la Concorde by Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas painted "Place de la Concorde" in 1875, but for half a century the world thought it was lost. It vanished after World War II, only to resurface in 1994 in a Hermitage Museum exhibition of art looted by Soviet forces. The painting captures Viscount Lepic, his daughters Eylau and Jeanine, and their greyhound crossing the enormous Parisian square, with the Tuileries Gardens visible behind a low stone wall.

Look closely at the family. The Viscount strides forward, yet his gaze drifts completely outside the frame. One daughter turns away. The dog looks toward a man cropped at the left edge. No two figures share a glance. Degas renders a family portrait where everyone is psychologically elsewhere, a quiet shock in 1875.

Then look into the background. Tiny pedestrian silhouettes cross the vast pavement. They are almost invisible at a scroll, but they give the painting its true scale. The family occupies an enormous public space, and the empty pavement around them becomes the argument. Degas refuses to fill that void, a compositional choice borrowed from photography and considered aggressively unfinished by academic standards of the day.

The man on the left may be playwright Ludovic Halévy, a friend of the artist. His cropping and separation from the family encode the anonymity and accidental encounter of modern urban life. Degas came from an affluent banking family himself, but he abandoned tradition to paint the candid, fractured city he saw around him.