Focus on this artwork and discuss the Process.
After his aunt and cousins returned in early November 1858, Degas undertook a series of works that would eventually culminate in The Bellelli Family. It appears that he initially planned to paint a vertical composition depicting his aunt and her two daughters in a pyramidical grouping.  He painted his cousins in their black dresses and white pinafores, while his father wrote letters from Paris, offering advice on how best to proceed with the project, and impatiently awaited his return. Degas wrote of Giulia and Giovanna:"The elder one was in fact a little beauty. The younger one, on the other hand, was smart as can be and kind as an angel. I am painting them in mourning dress and small white aprons, which suit them very well…I would like to express a certain natural grace together with a nobility that I don't know how to define...." 
At year's end, Degas stopped work on the double portrait of his young cousins in order to begin a larger painting; it is unclear whether he was undertaking The Bellelli Family itself, or making preparatory sketches.The preparatory works include portrait studies and compositional details in pencil, pastel, and oil. One drawing indicates Degas' initial intention to have Gennaro Bellelli seated at the end of the table, and an oil sketch placed him standing behind his daughters; finally, Degas painted him in the armchair.In late March 1859, Degas left Florence to return to Paris. Other than the conclusion that Degas worked on the picture "for several years", there is no documentation to confirm the actual time or place at which the picture was painted; a likely scenario is that Degas brought to France numerous sketches and studies and painted the picture in a studio procured for this purpose in Paris. Supporting this conclusion is the observation that the Bellelli's apartment was too small to host such a large work, and there were no studio facilities. In March 1860, Degas returned to Italy, in part to conduct family business, and in April he again visited the Bellellis and made several drawings of his uncle; at some point he also executed a pastel which, but for some differences in details and a greater elaboration of the interior in the final painting, is close to the ultimate composition.There is a family account, once accepted but more recently deemed unlikely, that offers a different version: a Neapolitan lawyer who married one of Degas' grandnieces claimed that the painting was completed in Italy, and brought back to France only some forty to fifty years later, but this is contradicted by evidence that the painting was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1867.
Florence Paris Salon left