137. Edgar Degas, Young Spartans Exercising, c.1860.
Oil on canvas, 109.5 x 155 cm.
The National Gallery, London.
138. Edgar Degas,
War Scene during Middle Age, c.1865.
Oil and gas on paper, 85 x 147 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
139. Edgar Degas, Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli, c.1865.
Oil on canvas, 117.2 x 89.7 cm.
Chester Dale Collection,
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Starting in 1854 Degas travelled frequently to Italy: first to Naples, where he made the acquaintance of his numerous cousins, and then to Rome and Florence, where he copied tirelessly from the Old Masters. His drawings and sketches already revealed very clear preferences: Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Mantegna, but also Benozzo Gozzoli, Ghirlandaio, Titian, Fra Angelico, Uccello, and Botticelli. He went to Orvieto specifically to copy from the frescoes of Luca Signorelli in the cathedral there, and visited Perugia and Assisi. The pyrotechnics of Italian painting dazzled him. Degas was lucky like no other. One can only marvel at the sensitivity Edgar’s father demonstrated with respect to his son’s vocation, at his insight into his son’s goals, and at the way he was able to encourage the young painter. “You’ve taken a giant step forward in your art, your drawing is strong, your colour tone is precise,” he wrote his son. “You no longer have anything to worry about, my dear Edgar, you are progressing beautifully. Calm your mind and, with tranquil and sustained effort, stick to the furrow that lies before you without straying. It’s your own – it is no one else’s. Go on working calmly, and keep to this path” (J. Bouret, Degas, Paris, 1987, p. 23).
In 1855 Degas began to pursue studies at the École des beaux-arts, but did not show any particular zeal for his work. Degas preferred to learn at the museums. As soon as his first vacation arrived, Degas took the opportunity to return to Italy. There, at the Villa Medici, fate brought him into contact with residents of the École des beaux-arts who would become his friends: the painters Léon Bonnat, Henri Fantin-Latour, Élie Delaunay, Gustave Moreau, the sculptors Paul Dubois and Henri Chapu, and the musician Georges Bizet, who had not yet composed Carmen. Their gatherings in the old neighbourhoods of Rome, and the picnics with the beauties of the Italian landscape in the background, would remain impressed on his memory to the end of his life.
In the 1850s Degas started doing portraits and self-portraits. From the very beginning in Degas’ portraits, one senses an attentive observer of human psychology. In Italy he began to paint portraits of his family members. One of his very first is an admirable portrait of his grandfather, René-Hilaire de Gas (Paris, Musée d’Orsay). It brings Titian’s portraits to mind. Its professional quality and Degas’ ease in handling the idiom of classical painting makes it possible to compare it to portraits by Ingres. This canvas foretells a future for the painter as a great portraitist. And he indeed became a remarkable portraitist. During the 1850s Degas began to paint the portraits of members of the Bellelli family, that of his father’s sister, who had married Baron Bellelli. He did composition studies, sketched the baron and his wife, painted his own cousins Giulia and Giovannini, and studied the hands of his subjects. The result was a large painting – 2½ by 3 square yards, and painted in Paris, The Bellelli Family, that recalls the portraits of Holbein, Jean Clouet, or Velázquez. But the sky-blue wallpaper with small white flowers lightens the colour scheme, and gives the painting the cozy, intimate feel of a life of ease. The classical balance of the composition is broken, completely unexpectedly, by a single detail: the master of the house, seated with his back to the viewer, turns so spontaneously and with such liveliness towards his wife that, in an instant, the impression of models in the act of posing vanishes. With his solid training in classical principles, the painter is beginning to turn, little by little, to that modern life which will soon absorb him completely.
140. Edgar Degas, The Family Portrait,
known as The Bellelli Family, between 1858 and 1869.
Oil on canvas, 200 x 250 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
141. Edgar Degas, Degas’s Father Listening to
Lorenzo Pagans Playing the Guitar, c.1869-1872.
Oil on canvas, 81.6 x 65.1 cm.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
142. Edgar Degas,
The Cotton Exchange in New Orleans, 1873.
Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm.
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau.
The enormous painting Jephthah’s Daughter is full of the influences of different masters, from Poussin to Raphael, and Delacroix. The painting Scene of War from the Middle Ages or The Misfortunes of the City of Orléans, with its baffling subject, could have been drawn from a tale that Degas’ grandfather, who was originally from Orléans, had told him. It reminds one of Delacroix. As early as the 1850s he discovered two absolutely new and unexpected subjects: horses and the ballet. In 1859 the Valpinçon family invited Edgar to spend a few weeks at their estate in Mesnil-Hubert, in Orne, where they had a horse-breeding farm. His eye noted their proportions, the particularities of the horse’s skeleton and the play of its muscles. After his first rather complex compositions depicting racetracks, Degas learned the art of translating the nobility and elegance of horses, their nervous movements, and the formal beauty of their musculature The Parade (Racehorses in front of the Stands).
143. Edgar Degas,
The Parade (Racehorses in front of the Stands),
between 1866 and 1868.
Oil on paper stuck on canvas, 46 x 61 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Around the middle of the 1860s Degas made yet another discovery. In 1866 he painted his first composition with ballet as a subject: Mademoiselle Fiocre in the Ballet “La Source”. Degas was going to the Paris Opera frequently, where in 1866 Eugénie Fiocre often danced “The Spring”. It’s true that, in this first painting, the ballet itself was not yet depicted. It was more a portrait of the ballet dancer. Mlle Fiocre is seated on stage surrounded by Oriental scenery, with a horse at her side. Degas had always been a devotee of the theatre, but from now on it would become more and more the focus of his art. It gradually permeated his painting through his portraiture. After Mlle Fiocre he turned to painting portraits of musicians.
In 1869 he did an admirable portrait of his father with Pagans, the musician: Degas’ Father with Pagans singing. Pagans occupies the foreground, wholly absorbed in his music, a guitar in his hands. In spite of the almost classical construction of the composition and the seemingly static nature of the subjects, there is action in this painting: Pagans is singing and Degas’ father is listening. This becomes a characteristic aspect of Degas’ art. Like Manet and the Impressionists, he rejects subject and literary narrative, but in his own paintings there is always something going on.
144. Edgar Degas, Jockeys, 1882.
Oil on canvas, 26.4 x 39.8 cm.
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.
In that same year of 1869 Degas painted The Orchestra of the Opera House (Paris, Musée d’Orsay).). At first glance this painting is also just a portrait of musicians. In fact it is a portrait of a whole group of the painter’s friends, whom his imagination has gathered together in the orchestra pit. The faces are painted in close up, they are individualised, they have character, and, above all, they are not posing. They are engrossed in the music. Before Edgar Degas, no one yet had done anything like this. Three years later, in 1872, Degas’ first painting devoted solely to the ballet appeared: Le Foyer de la danse à l’Opéra de la rue Le Peletier (The Dance Class at the Opera, Rue Le Peletier). Degas moved from the theatre on to the rehearsal halls, where the dancers practised and took their lessons. And it was how Degas arrived at the second sphere of that immediate, everyday life that was to interest him. The ballet would remain his passion until the end of his days.
When the Franco-Prussian war began in 1870 Degas enlisted in the French National Guard art
illery. It was during his service in the army, as well, that he learned he might lose his eyesight, which would have a tragic impact on his life.
In that same year of 1872 Degas went to New Orleans to visit his mother’s relatives, who were cotton traders. Although the purpose of the trip was business, he sketched a great deal. Though by nature disinclined to react with much emotion, he was happy about his new impressions, all the same.
145. Edgar Degas, The Song Rehearsal, c.1872-1873.
Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm.
The Dumbarton Oaks Collection, Washington, D.C.
146. Edgar Degas,
The Café-Concert at the Ambassadeurs, 1876-1877.
Pastel, 37 x 26 cm.
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon.
For the 1874 exhibition Degas contributed canvases and drawings with motifs that, from then on, would be his own for the rest of his life: the theatre, ballet classes, washerwomen, racetracks, and nudes. In the exhibition that followed, portraits, milliners, and paintings executed from impressions of New Orleans appeared. Cabarets and the circus would come later. At the beginning of his development as an Impressionist two paintings represented extremely important steps.
Degas was the only painter of his generation who took photography seriously. He began to be interested in it rather late, in the middle of the 1880s, and bought a camera around 1895. This proves that the unique features of Degas’ compositions do not relate to the direct influence of the camera, but to the specificity of his own vision of the world. And when he began to take photographs himself, it was his vision that influenced the compositions of his photographs, not the other way around.
In 1876 Degas painted In a Café (L’Absinthe). At that time the artists had already abandoned the Café Guerbois and reunited at La Nouvelle Athènes in the Place Pigalle. Degas had lived in this neighbourhood for a large portion of his life: in Rue Blanche, Rue Fontaine, and Rue Saint-Georges. He could now be seen regularly in the evenings, on the terrace of La Nouvelle Athènes, with Édouard Manet, Émile Zola, and various Impressionists and critics. For his new painting he asked his friend the engraver Marcellin Desboutin, just back from Florence, and the pretty actress Ellen Andrée to pose for him. Ellen Andrée would later pose at the same location, on the terrace of La Nouvelle Athènes, for Édouard Manet’s The Plum, and also for Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party on the island of Croissy. Degas depicted her as a prostitute of the Parisian streets with a lost look, sitting absolutely still before a glass of absinthe, absorbed in thought. At her side, a pipe clenched between his teeth and hat pushed back onto his neck, one of the café regulars is seated. He seems to be looking into the distance, not aware of the woman seated just beside him. Squeezed into a corner behind little empty tables, they are almost touching one other, but each is in their own world. Again, Degas has succeeded in setting down on the canvas something almost impossible to capture: the bitter solitude of a human being in the merriest, liveliest city in the world.
One of the main differences between Degas’ ideas and those of the other Impressionists was his point of view regarding open-air painting. For all the others, open-air painting was both an aim and an essential condition of their work. However, with Degas, it was not living nature that caused a landscape to appear on paper or canvas. On the contrary it was a shape, or a line seen at random, that would give birth to a landscape in his imagination. This odd attitude of Degas’ towards landscapes had two explanations, however. Firstly, Degas’ greatest misfortune must not be forgotten, the weakness of his eyesight. What was most important, though, was that Degas had more confidence in his prodigious memory than in a fleeting impression.
The second difference between Degas and the Impressionists was in his attitude towards drawing. Renoir and his friends had been accused of not knowing how to draw because, in their work, the vibrations of air and light had the effect of blurring their line; their colour predominated over their drawing. For Degas drawing always came first.
147. Edgar Degas, Portrait of Mlle Fiocre
in the Ballet “La Source”, c.1867-1868.
Oil on canvas, 130.8 x 145.1 cm.
Brooklyn Museum, New York.
148. Edgar Degas,
In a Café (L’Absinthe), between 1875 and 1876.
Oil on canvas, 92 x 68.5 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
After the death of Degas’ father in 1873 the Degas family bank failed, and there was nothing left for the painter but to rely on his art. Like the other Impressionists, he suffered from the fact that his paintings were impossible to sell and, like Renoir, Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro, he went to Durand-Ruel to ask for money. And, like Sisley, he never painted commissions. He worked only on what interested him. He kept repeating, reworking and varying his same favourite motifs. He liked improving himself. His friends recounted how he could start over and over again on one and the same work without ever fully completing it. At the close of the 1870s Degas added cabaret scenes to his repertoire – before Manet had painted his Bar at the Folies-Bergère. What is represented in The Absinthe Drinker is, in fact, the work of a stage or film director. In 1877 Degas painted two paintings, Women on a Café Terrace, sometimes called Café, Boulevard Montmartre (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) and The Café-Concert at the Ambassadeurs. In these the painter seems to be representing a moment glimpsed at random. Objectively and instantaneously the painter sets down on canvas the posturing, gestures, and expressions of the ladies as they chatter among themselves. “M. Degas seems to have hurled a challenge at the Phillistines, that is to say the classicists,” wrote the critic Alexandre Pothey in an article on the third exhibition of the Impressionists. “The women in Women on a Café Terrace are frighteningly realistic. These painted, withered creatures, reeking of vice, cynically recounting the events and gestures of the day – you’ve seen them, you know them, and you’ll come across them again on the boulevards soon” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 303).
It seems strange that as refined an artist as Degas, a frequenter of society salons, would have been aware in Paris of those washerwomen and pressers who became the objects of his study. Yet, when he was in New Orleans and felt nostalgic for France, it was the washerwomen who embodied and symbolised the French life of his time for him, to which he dreamt of returning as quickly as possible. He drew women leaning over their irons, and found an original grace and beauty in their repetitive movements. His firm line set down the mechanics of their movements, while the colour, by means of a few light patches, gave the appearance of a black and white photograph as it is being developed (Two Pressers, Paris, Musée d’Orsay).
He painted ballet classes during lessons and as the dancers rested. It was rare for a ballet dancer to appear on his canvases as an airy, ethereal vision. Drawing, in these instances, makes way for colour to play the principal role. In the stage’s unreal atmosphere, the pink, sky-blue and white tutus glitter and disappear. Most often, the ballet dancer in a Degas work is shown simply as a woman, exhausted from pushing herself too hard. She has lost her stage charm. She exercises endlessly at the bar, and she strains as she stretches her tired legs. She is weak and miserable. The truth of everyday life would enter in at the moments when the ballet dancer was protected from the gaze of strangers, or when, bent over with fatigue, she would have to go through the humiliation of a long wait to be seen by the theatrical director (Waiting, New York, Havemeyer Collection).
At the sixth Impressionist exhibition everyone marvelled at the wax statuette of a ballet dancer, almost one metre high, The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer. The tutu was of real white tulle, the bodice of waxed yellow canvas, the hair was knotted in a ponytail with a red satin ribbon, and the ballet slippers had yellow laces. Upright, in ballet position, her hands are behind her back, her head thrown back. “With her tarlatan petticoat, skinny, and as ugly as can be”, wrote the critic Charles Ephrussi, “but standing erect, arching back, and swaying, with that angular movement common to dance apprentices. She is rendered firmly, boldl
y, and with shrewdness, in a way that conveys, with infinite wisdom, the private demeanor and manner as well as the profession, embodied in the person (…) An ordinary artist would have turned this dancer into a puppet. M. Degas has turned her into a distinct, incisive, technically precise work, and in a truly original form” (Degas Inédit [Degas Unedited], op. cit., p. 336-337).
149. Edgar Degas,
Dance Class at the Opera, rue Le Peletier, 1872.
Oil on canvas, 32 x 46 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
150. Edgar Degas, The Rehearsal on Stage, 1874 (?).
Pastel over brush-and-ink drawing
on thin cream-colored wove paper,
laid down on bristol board and mounted on canvas,
Impressionism Page 11