Influenced by photography and Japanese prints, Degas’s form of Impressionism involved experiments with a wide variety of techniques. A consummate technician, he was intrigued by process, often rejecting simple solutions for more elaborate combinations.

In 1879 Degas proposed to Cassatt, Pissarro, Raffaëlli, and Bracquemond the idea of producing a print publication. The journal, to be called Le Jour et la nuit (Day and Night), reflected the artists’ interest in black-and-white imagery and the contradictory properties of light and shadow. 

The journal was never published, but Cassatt, Pissarro, and Degas made small editions of their prints and showed them in the fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880. Degas’s contribution, Au Louvre: Musée des Antiques, shows the figure of Mary Cassatt standing in front of an Etruscan sarcophagus, a seated figure with a guidebook (probably her sister Lucia) looking on. The original design for the print was a pastel in which the figures are placed in reverse and are standing in the Grande Galerie of paintings rather than among antiquities.

In this print, Degas has deftly employed the etching and drypoint lines to clearly delineate detail while the aquatint, twice printed, adds tonality and shading. Degas revised the plate many times (nine states exist, of which this is the sixth), and the final composition is sophisticated and polished, with no apparent tentativeness in execution.