This unusual perspective on a woman with arms crossed behind her back is typical of the unorthodox vantage points favored by Degas. His subject is believed to be an impatient young saleswoman whom he observed in a Parisian hat shop. The ingenious articulation of her shoulders and arms demonstrates his unerring draftsmanship, while the lustrous blue of the woman's bodice reflects the artist's deft use of pastel.

Though Degas often exhibited with the Impressionists and shared their interest in spontaneity, he was not attracted to their practice of rapid painting out of doors.

Seen from above and behind, a straitlaced saleswoman in a startlingly blue jacket sits with her arms impatiently crossed and her nose impudently poked in the air, unmindful of clients who lose themselves in the shadows of a milliner's shop. Although Edgar Degas's drawing looks like a candid snapshot of an anecdotal moment of daily life in Paris, it represents a carefully calculated effect.

The painter Mary Cassatt, Degas's friend and protégée, reported that Degas sometimes accompanied her to the dressmaker's or the milliner's. Back in his studio, he might ask her to reprise the customer's role, if the pose he desired to draw was a particularly difficult one. Her testimony illuminates the apparent contradiction between Degas's affiliation with the Impressionists-devotees of outdoor painting and spontaneous brushwork-and his own statement "No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters." His constant observation of the passing crowd enabled him to grasp and convey the attitude of a snippy clerk. His constant practice of drawing allowed him to describe that attitude with a single, essential outline and a dash of colored chalk.

M. Degas, who ranks himself with the Impressionists, though he is only attached to them by the coattails, is trying to revive [the 18th-century pastel] by rejuvenating it.
-Art critic Louis Gonse, 1877