Curatorial description
Louise Halévy, Edgar Degas's friend since childhood, reclines with eyes closed as if in reverie, having fallen asleep reading. The gas lamp that lights the scene is so intense that it appears in the picture as a flare of dominating, unmodulated white, thus breaking the rules of "good" photography. Not formally trained in photography, Degas wrote of wanting to photograph intangible subjects like shadows and states of mind like dreaming.
