DEGAS Edgar (1834-1917). Portrait of Ludovic Halévy. Around 1895. Photograph. Period silver print. 8.2 x 7.4 cm. Condition A. At the beginning of the 1890s, Degas gradually abandoned his passion for the darkroom, giving up pencils and brushes for a while. In particular, he photographed members of the Halévy family in intimate shots: "Around 1890, when he photographed Ludovic and Louis Halévy, he dined at their home two or three times a week - Degas was happiest when his models were comfortably inert, immobilized, not by the vice of the old-fashioned daguerreotype, but by the amply upholstered cushions of the armchair or when they had "dozed off" during the "terrible quarter of an hour" of posing they had to support. ... [Degas] did not photograph anyone he did not know very well, although this may be a false claim, based on the only surviving photographs. "A close friend of Degas, whose passion for opera he shared, the writer and librettist Ludovic Halévy (1834-1908), co-author of the libretto of George Bizet's Carmen (1875), also appears in several of the artist's prints and drawings devoted to the backstage world of the stage (including an important pastel from 1879, kept at the Musée d'Orsay). Reference: Eugenia Parry Janis, "Le théâtre photographique de Degas", in Collectif, Degas, le modelé et l'espace, Paris, Marais-Guillaud Éditions, 1984, p. 470.