We had the very intense experience of seeing the Degas exhibition Drawn in Colour at the National Gallery with Julien Domercq, its curator. It assembles the Degas works from the Burrell collection, acquired by Sir William Burrell, the Glasgow shipping magnate, from 1900 onwards from his dealer, Alexander Reid. Many of them have not previously been displayed and so are scarcely known to Degas scholarship. It’s an amazing opportunity to see the paintings next to pastels and compare the flatness and experimentation of his technique, the freedom of his composition, and his obsessional observation of the privacy of female form. The label for Dancer adjusting her Shoulder Strap adduces this to Degas’s putative misogyny, but the tenderness and fascination of the observation doesn’t suggest misogyny.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
Surely Degas’s amazing attention to the minute details of women is as far from misogyny as it’s possible to be ?
The accusation goes back to Huysmans. Charles
You have reminded me of a long-ago and almost forgotten visit to the Burrell Collection in 1991 while I was living and teaching in England. It struck me then as a most intriguing collection and I do recall the Degas collection. It has never occurred to me that the paintings could be construed as ‘mysogynistic’.