When Edgar Degas painted Degas's Father Listening to Lorenzo Pagans Playing the Guitar in 1870, he captured a rare and intimate scene from his own family life, just as the world around him was about to change. That same year, the Franco-Prussian War would force the artist to leave Paris and join the National Guard. The painting stands as a quiet moment before upheaval, immortalizing the friendship between Degas’s father, Auguste, and the Spanish tenor and guitarist Lorenzo Pagans, who often visited the Degas home.

This is one of the few works where Degas turns his attention away from dancers and racehorses to his own domestic world. The painting shows a moment of private music-making: Lorenzo Pagans, guitar in hand, is caught mid-performance, his body angled towards Auguste Degas, who listens with closed eyes and folded arms, lost in the music. The soft, diffused light falls on the elder Degas’s white hair and face, highlighting his absorption and the hush of the room. The cluttered background—sheet music, books, and a piano—speaks to the cultivated, cosmopolitan milieu of the Degas household.

Unlike the formal portraits of the time, Degas here adopts an informal, almost snapshot-like composition, recalling the intimacy found in Manet’s portraits of friends and family. The painting’s warmth lies in these details: the gentle gestures, the sense of time suspended by music. Though the exact medium of this work remains uncertain, it is typical of the period when Degas experimented with oil, pastel, and mixed techniques. The painting was never a public commission; it remained within the Degas family for many years, a personal keepsake rather than a showpiece.

After Degas’s death in 1917, many of his family portraits were dispersed, and today this work is held in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. It marks a turning point in Degas’s career, just before his focus shifted almost entirely to the world of the ballet and to the innovations of Impressionism. The painting remains a rare window into the artist’s private world, and into the Parisian circles that shaped his early artistic vision.