A bearded man in a top hat, a cigar in his mouth and an umbrella tucked under his arm, strides across a wide, empty square with his two small daughters and a lean gray dog. The girls look in different directions, and a man at the far left is cut off by the edge of the picture. Behind them stretch the pale paving of the Place de la Concorde, a carriage, a rider and distant buildings and trees. Edgar Degas painted his friend, the artist Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic, with his daughters in this casual moment; the Hermitage record dates it 1875.

It was not a commission. Short of money, Degas sold the canvas to Lepic, and it was never exhibited and stayed almost unknown until the end of the century; its lack of a signature long hampered the dealer Durand-Ruel's efforts to sell it. It later belonged to the Berlin collector Otto Gerstenberg. After the fall of Berlin in 1945 it was sent to the Soviet Union as a war trophy and kept at the Hermitage, where it was believed lost until the museum's 1995–96 exhibition Hidden Treasures Revealed.

During restoration in 2010–2011, canvas folded behind the stretcher was opened out, so the painting is now four centimeters taller. It is in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.