Great artists attract base prejudices; base but instructive. Jean-François Raffaëlli, painter of the Parisian suburbs, claimed in 1894 that Degas was an artist ‘seeking to render ignoble the secret forms of Woman’; he was someone who ‘must dislike women’; and in evidence Raffaëlli reported the words of one of Degas’s models: ‘He’s a strange gentleman – he spends the whole four hours of the sitting combing my hair.’

Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (2015)