On March 24, 1892, Lucas met Edgar Degas at Charles Sedelmeyer’s Paris gallery. He subsequently viewed exhibitions of the artist’s work at the Durand-Ruel gallery in November of the same year and at the dealer Goupil’s in April 1898. In the spring of 1903, he negotiated a purchase by Baltimorean Henry Walters of a small portrait of Degas’s cousin from Mary Cassatt. Degas’s career as a printmaker spanned some forty years, from the late 1850s into the early 1890s. While his initial attempts may be seen as traditional in their imagery and technique, he became increasingly experimental, consistently altering his original concepts through many intermediate states in an evolving process of revision.