X-rays of The Millinery Shop show the woman underneath wearing an ornate hat and a dress with lace at the sleeves. That is a customer. Degas painted the hat out. In the finished picture she is bare-headed and holding a hat she might be making or might be buying, and the museum says the ambiguity is deliberate.
What is underneath
The X-ray photographs and the early drawings tell the same story. A pastel study for the picture has her in an elegant yellow hat, which settles what she started out as.
In Paris in the 1880s a respectable woman did not go out with her head bare, so taking the hat off her is not tidying-up. It removes the single detail that would have told you her class at a glance.
What he left behind is contradictory on purpose. The green wool dress is good enough for a wealthy client. The long gloves are the kind a milliner wore to keep her hands off the silk. Her lips are pursed in the way art historians read as a pin held between them.
The hats get the light
The hats take up more of the canvas than the woman does. They sit on wooden stands in the middle of the picture, pale straw, green trimming, a dark red one behind, all of them catching the light.
She is pushed over to the right edge with her hands and the hat she is holding cut off by the frame. Degas looked down on the scene from above, which is a habit of his and which keeps her from ever filling the space.
And there is a joke in it. One of the straw hats is placed so that it appears to be sitting on her head, giving her the one thing the picture has carefully taken away. It is the largest painting he made of the trade, a metre by a metre and ten.
Fifty thousand francs
Degas came back to milliners' shops over and over in these years, in paint and in pastel, and in all of them the merchandise is in the middle and the person who made it is at the edge.
This is the biggest of them, and he kept it. In February 1913, when he was seventy-eight, he sold it to the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel for fifty thousand francs, more than he was ever paid for any other picture of the trade.
Durand-Ruel sold it on to Annie Coburn of Chicago in January 1932 for about thirty-six thousand dollars, and it went to the Art Institute the following year.
The hats on the table are the newest fashions for spring and summer in the early 1880s, which dates the shop about as precisely as a photograph would.
The hats in the middle got the light. Nobody has settled since whether the woman at the edge was buying them or making them.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.