Degas studied with Louis Lamothe, a pupil of Ingres, at the École des Beaux-Arts, copied paintings in the Louvre, and spent three years in Italy, devoting his youth to mastering Renaissance painting. From the 1860s on, however, painting portraits of friends and genre scenes in Paris, he began interacting with Manet and the artists who became the Impressionists. Léopold Levert, the subject of this portrait, began as a military uniform designer but became a landscape artist and printmaker, Degas having encouraged his change of careers. Levert showed in the first through third and the fifth Impressionist exhibitions, which began in the period when this por trait was painted. He was close friends with Henri Rouart. That Rouart initially owned this portrait is an indication of Degas’s central role in the ties between these artists. The detailed depiction of Levert’s face and head reveal Degas’s background in academic painting. In the torso, simplified and painted in rapid brushwork, we see more characteristically Impressionist techniques. The painting’s keynote is the combination of black clothing and white background. The strokes of red around the head were probably made with a palette knife and show us Degas uninhibitedly painting a good friend.