In 1855, a young Edgar Degas—long before his fame as a chronicler of dancers and Parisian life—chose to copy a revolutionary martyr: the boy-soldier Joseph Bara, whose death in 1793 became a symbol of the French Republic. The source was The Death of Joseph Bara by Jacques-Louis David, a painting that itself was never completed but whose lost image haunted the Romantic imagination. Degas’s early engagement with this subject is remarkable, as it marks one of the rare times he tackled overtly political history, and it is one of only a handful of known student works by him that survive. The scene captures the final moment of Joseph Bara, a fourteen-year-old drummer in the Republican army, ambushed and killed by royalist forces during the French Revolution.

Bara reportedly refused to cry "Long live the King!" before his death, and in the painting, his collapsed body, limp drum, and upward gaze crystallize his sacrifice. Degas, following David’s composition, focuses on the boy’s vulnerability: the pale, exposed chest, the broken drumsticks, and the quiet dignity of the pose. Unlike David’s heroic neoclassicism, Degas’s version hints at a softer, more personal tragedy—closer in feeling to Delacroix’s romantic martyrs than to the grand gestures of revolutionary propaganda. The medium of Degas’s copy is uncertain, as is much of its early history; it likely emerged from his academic training, when copying the masters was a rite of passage for aspiring artists.

There is no record of a commission or public exhibition, and the work’s whereabouts were unknown for decades before resurfacing in private collections. Today, it stands as a rare window into Degas’s formative years, offering a glimpse of his early technical skill and his engagement with the great themes of French art. The painting’s journey mirrors the fate of many student copies—at once an homage, a learning exercise, and a personal statement—before Degas turned his gaze to the modern world.