Edmondo and Therese Morbilli, c.1865 Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas (1834-1917)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Edmondo and Therese Morbilli is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

In "Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli," Degas offers us a complex, almost haunting, portrayal of two figures suspended in an atmosphere as tense as it is intimate. Thérèse, draped in a voluminous, indistinct dress of mottled whites and grays, sits in stoic repose, her gaze direct yet detached. Her husband, Edmondo, turns away slightly, his body angled to reveal only half of his face, which gazes towards us with a look that borders on the defensive. The scene feels both immediate and distant - as if these two have been frozen in time mid-argument or at the brink of some unspoken confession. Degas captures their "familiar and typical attitudes," as he would say, but with a curious sense of detachment that leaves their inner worlds tantalizingly ambiguous.

The color palette is restrained yet striking. Thérèse’s red shawl - an almost alarmingly bright splash amidst the muted tones - creates a tension that vibrates across the canvas. Her pale skin and dark dress have a spectral quality, blending into the heavy, unremarkable background, with its faded green wallpaper and shadowy recesses. The room itself is a box of shadows and half-glimpsed figures - a single woman in the distance, barely more than a silhouette, a vague detail that speaks to the disinterest Degas had for conventional backdrops. The focus, instead, is unrelentingly on the couple - their expressions and body language - every ounce of color reinforcing their strained intimacy.

Degas’ brushwork here is varied and telling. Where the faces are meticulously detailed, showing the care and depth of his technical prowess, the dress and shawl are deliberately blurred, rubbed away into mere impressions of form. This technique, almost reckless in its execution, adds a rawness, a sense of incompletion, that imbues the piece with a modern sensibility. The viewer is left with an almost tactile awareness of the artist’s process - the scraping, the rubbing, the reworking. It’s as if Degas has exposed not only the psyche of his sitters but the very construction of the painting itself.

The composition is strikingly unbalanced, drawing the viewer’s eye to Thérèse first, then across to Edmondo, and finally to the recesses of the room. This staggered arrangement forces the viewer to consider each element separately, as if Degas is reluctant to give us the full story at once. We are left to piece it together ourselves, feeling our way through the tangled threads of familial tension and social restraint. In its unfinished state, "Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli" resonates as an exploration of identity, both personal and relational, frozen at a juncture that speaks to the fragmentary nature of human experience.