Portraits at the Stock Exchange ca. 1878-79 Edgar Degas French Degas presents a glimpse of the busy commerce under the portico of the Paris stock exchange. Financier and art collector Ernest May (1845-1925), wearing spectacles, receives a document for perusal, as an associate, identified as Monsieur Boltre, leans over his shoulder. The artist made this pastel as a study for an oil painting of 1878-79 (Musée dOrsay, Paris). At the time, May was in his early thirties, and just beginning to expand his acquisitions from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pictures to works by Degas, Manet, and their colleagues.. Portraits at the Stock Exchange 436154