The Bellelli Family

The Bellelli Family, also known as Family Portrait, is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French artist Edgar Degas, painted between 1858 and 1867 and measuring 200 by 253 centimeters. It portrays Degas's aunt Laura Bellelli, her husband Baron Gennaro Bellelli, an Italian patriot who had fled Naples after the failed 1848 revolution, and their two young daughters, Giulia and Giovanna, during the family's exile in Florence. Laura wears mourning dress for her recently deceased father, whose portrait hangs framed behind her, and the spacing and posture of the four figures quietly convey the emotional distance between the parents. Regarded as a masterpiece of Degas's youth, the composition draws on Dutch seventeenth-century portraiture and on Velazquez. It is held in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.