Degas's Apotheosis

This curious photograph – a silver print from a silver gelatine glass negative, dated 1885 – is titled 'The Apotheosis of Degas', and shows that artist sitting on the steps of a house in Dieppe surrounded by worshippers. Created with the help of a Dieppe portraitist and photographer, Walter Barnes, it is a parody of 'The Apotheosis of Homer', a heroic history painting by Ingres, one of Degas's artistic heroes.

Degas sent the photograph of his own apotheosis to his friends, partly as a joke but partly, one suspects, as an assertion of the artistic continuity between Ingres and himself – and indeed as a half-serious assertion of his own greatness; he was a man with a good conceit of himself. 
Ever the perfectionist, Degas later criticised his own composition: 'My three muses and my choir boys should have been grouped against a white or pale background, the costumes of the women in particular are lost. And the figures should also have been closer together.' Still, it works well enough.