DEGAS, Edgar

The theme of this work comes from the world of the theatre. Eug�nie Fiocre was a ballerina at the Paris Opera, and one of her main parts was the role of Nouredda in Saint-L�on’s ballet “La Source.” There is a romantic undercurrent in this painting showing a charming exoticism. The theatrical setting is not taken from the reality of the stage, as in Degas’s later paintings of dancers, but appears as an element of romanticism. However, the drinking horse is a realistic detail, a real life study.

Degas had an immense repertoire of drawing techniques and idioms. Unusual precision and finesse were as much his as fast, sure-touch charcoal sketching. From preparatory drawings of details to drawings done in their own right, from charcoal drawings that used coloured pastel to loosely done gouaches, drawings for Degas were not a tiresome convention, but represented a challenge to experiment.

This painting contains an element of social criticism, similar to that in Zola’s L’Assommoir” denouncing the destruction caused by alcoholism. The last two customers at the caf� are seated in the right-hand part of the painting, with the gray reflection of the street behind them. The couple is surrounded by emptiness. The actress Ellen Andr�e and the engraver Marcellin Desboutin served as models, but the painting goes beyond a mere portrait. They become the symbol of a nameless destiny.

Degas simply referred to this painting as In the Caf�, the present title was added later.

Edgar Degas often depicted women in awkward and inelegant poses, eliciting sharp criticism. An early practitioner of Realism, Degas captured women engaged in mundane tasks - laundresses ironing, prostitutes waiting for clients, and, most frequently, women bathing.

The intimate subject of this painting, a woman bathing in a private interior, is one that invites voyeurism. Degas depicted the woman lying on a divan, while her maid dries or combs her hair. With her back pushed to the extreme foreground of the images, she seems to hold the viewer at bay. Bracing herself with her left arm, the woman uncomfortably raises her left leg against the edge of the bathtub. Such unnatural poses have perplexed critics of Degas’s time, as they do viewers today. Some see these poses as an attempt to depict human movement not in idealized forms, but in ordinary, private behaviour. Others see such representations of women as misogynistic.

This painting is among Degas’s few genuinely Impressionist landscapes. However, this is no Manet or Monet beach scene, rather, it gathers a number of characteristic Degas motifs, such as the nanny combing the girl’s hair.

Between 1875 and 1880, Degas often went to the music hall, where he sensed more than anywhere else the pulsing life of the large city.

Degas painted several pictures set in millinery shops. The milliners are caught in the most absurd positions, surrounded by brightly coloured hats and slanting mirrors often placed at the edge of the painting. They are completely absorbed by the fitting of hats and lose all individual dignity.

Degas did over twenty pictures of milliners. It was a subject that Eva Gonzalez had already painted before him. Paris was a great metropolis of Fashion, and Degas was glad to accompany Mary Cassatt to the milliners’ and seamstresses’ studios. What resulted was not psychological studies but searching scrutiny of an unfamiliar way of life.

In the present pastel on paper, Degas shows a customer examining herself in a new hat. The mirror divides up the composition.

Around 1880 Degas’s grays gave way to brilliant colours, ranging from red to russet, and muted tones were replaced by warm ones. This came with a change in style and technique, in which pastels became his dominant medium. Degas was the only nineteenth-century painter who made pastels his primary medium. He saw that pastels struck a balance between painting and drawing, enabling him to paint while drawing. Furthermore, he expanded the possibilities offered by pastels by combining them with gouache, watercolour, oils mixed freely with turpentine, and even monotypes.

Horse racing, a sport of English origin, became popular on the Continent at the end of the eighteenth century, and soon inspired such painters as Carle Vernet and Th�odore G�ricault, who were both influenced by English artists. It attracted the interest of later painters, too. Manet emphasized the elegance of these occasions, while Degas preferred to observe the horses in motion. He focused on the movements of man and animal. His first sketches of racecourses date back to the beginning of the 1860s. At first he was interested in the jockeys, but he also turned a keen eye on the spectators. This led to the At the Races in the Countryside.

Degas never tires of the theme of the racecourse. On September 27, 1881, the newspaper “Le Globe” started publishing Major Muybridge’s photographs of a galloping horse, and Degas used them for his sketches. The photographs showed that traditional English prints were inaccurate when depicting galloping horses with their front legs outstretched. This is how Degas painted the horses racing in the background of At the Races in the Countryside of 1869.

Degas exhibited this moderately colourful work at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. The race itself is in the background, the foreground is occupied by a family scene centred on a baby, with the nurse, mother, father and even the dog atop the box. The family is the Valpin�on family: the driver of the carriage is Degas’s friend Paul Valpin�on, who is shown with his wife, a wet nurse, and in the nurse’s lap, the couple’s son, Henri. The people in the carriage are caught in their fashionable elegance.

Since the 1830s, the opera houses, theatres and vaudeville shows had grown in number and importance in the new Paris. Artists were fascinated by famous caf�s among which the Caf� des Ambassadeurs was one of the oldest that offered musical entertainment.

In his early scenes from the theatrical world, Degas depicted only that which the audience or musicians could see of the stage. However, later he went backstage, and he became a cool observer of rehearsals. In his paintings the stage changed from being an incidental setting of the picture to become the theme of the picture itself. Following his works showing the rehearsal room and the stage as a whole (even when only a corner is depicted), there came his series of astounding variations on the theme of dancers, in groups or isolated, in which the artist gained more and more freedom of vision, forever changing angles and capturing the ballerinas in the most surprising positions. The dancers are painted more and more in close-up. They do not move within a well-defined three-dimensional space, they fill the foreground with colours against the wings and curtains.

The most remarkable among these works are the different versions of Ballerina with a Bouquet, Curtsying. The dancer is a sylph, arms outstretched, and still carried by the last movement at the close of her solo. She bows, bathed in the brilliant spotlight, with the unreal, fantastic decor of the ballet as her background.

The composition of this extraordinary picture is one of thorough calculation. Down the centre runs a diagonal demarcation separating Jules Perrot, the instructor, two resting dancers and a mother from the three dancers currently exercising. The mother in her flowery dress and straw hat is reading “Le Petit Journal” and taking no interest in the class.

Degas has played a subtle trick with our perceptions: the glimpse we have of Paris beyond the room is not seen through a window on the rear wall it is in fact the dancers’ mirror.

One of the nineteenth century’s most innovative artists, Edgar Degas often combined traditional techniques in unorthodox ways. In Ballet at the Paris Op�ra, the artist creatively joined the monotype technique, rarely used in his time, with the fragile medium of pastel. Described as “the powder of butterfly wings,” pastel was the perfect medium to illustrate the onstage metamorphosis of spindly young dancers into visions of beauty as perfect and short-lived as butterflies.

This work, executed on one of the widest monotype plates ever used by the artist, bears Degas’s characteristically cropped forms and odd vantage points, which effectively convey the immediacy of the scene. The view is from the orchestra pit, with the necks of the double basses intruding into the dancers’ zone. The central dancer is in fifth position, en pointe, but the random placement of the corps de ballet, with the dancers’ free-flowing hair, suggests a rehearsal rather than a performance. The Paris Op�ra was the official school of the first state-supported ballet, the Acad�mie Royale de Danse, created in 1661.

The picture is signed, lower left, in white pastel: “Degas”.

Most of all, Degas is interested in depicting a body in motion. His paintings and drawings of bathing women become a complete repertoire of every posture and movement of a woman in her bathroom.

This painting is a striking example of Degas’s ability to capture a split moment in a movement, in a fleeting image highlighted by the asymmetrical composition and the lack of perspective.

Since the 1830s, the opera houses, theatres and vaudeville shows had grown in number and importance in the new Paris. Artists were fascinated by famous caf�s among which the Caf� des Ambassadeurs was one of the oldest that offered musical entertainment.

Since 1880 Degas experimented with sculpture and he modeled more and more as his eyesight declined, making sculptures of ballerinas and horses. He sculpted in clay, wax and putty. After his death, about 150 small sculptural works were found in his studio. Only half of them were in a state to allow of bronze casts being taken.

For Degas, a dancer was no more than a creature of movement, and he conceived his work as a record of that movement. The Great Arabesque shows an essential classical ballet position, and neatly demonstrates the significance of equilibrium in dance.

Since 1880 Degas experimented with sculpture and he modeled more and more as his eyesight declined, making sculptures of ballerinas and horses. He sculpted in clay, wax and putty. After his death, about 150 small sculptural works were found in his studio. Only half of them were in a state to allow of bronze casts being taken.

For Degas, a dancer was no more than a creature of movement, and he conceived his work as a record of that movement. The Great Arabesque shows an essential classical ballet position, and neatly demonstrates the significance of equilibrium in dance.

Degas had an immense repertoire of drawing techniques and idioms. Unusual precision and finesse were as much his as fast, sure-touch charcoal sketching. From preparatory drawings of details to drawings done in their own right, from charcoal drawings that used coloured pastel to loosely done gouaches, drawings for Degas were not a tiresome convention, but represented a challenge to experiment.

Although the dancers appear to be casually observed, the composition was meticulously worked out. The artist’s fascination with form and structure is reflected in the analogy between the watering can (used to wet down the dust on the studio floor) and the dancer at the right. The handle on the side imitates her left arm, the handle at the top mimics her head, and the spout approximates her right arm and raised leg. Later in life Degas regretted this visual joke and wished to paint out the can, but the owner of the canvas, a friend of the artist, refused to allow Degas to retouch it.

Degas produced many portraits between 1865 and 1870, too, the major ones of which were Th�r�se de Gas, Double Portrait, The Collector, Madame Hertel, Duke and Duchess of Morbilli, Jacques Joseph (James) Tissot, Mademoiselle Dihau at the Piano, Madame Camus at the Piano, Portrait of Hortense Valpin�on as a Child.

Conventional as they may be, these portraits highlight both what is characteristic and what is casual in the personality and deportment of the sitter.

The painting represents the cousins of the painter.

Louis Edmond Duranty (1833-1880) was a prolific French novelist and art critic. He supported the realist cause and later the Impressionists. He was a frequent visitor to the Caf� Guerbois group, which included Manet, at the centre of the group, and many writers and painters. Their vigorous debates provided Degas with an entirely new mental environment.

Degas was particularly close to Duranty, and painted a celebrated portrait of him in 1879.

This painting, one of the largest and most ambitious of Degas’s late works, exists in several variants that show different kinds and degrees of modification.

Degas’s paintings used a restless patterning of colour patches and combined a precision rendering of positions with sketchy brushwork - especially for the background, where smoking factory chimneys or a glimpse of a railway train suggested the proximity of a modern city. Degas cropped his figures brusquely as if to emphasize that the picture could convey no more than a spatial and temporal section of a larger scene and continuing motion.

Degas’s family were related to the Italian aristocracy, among them Baroness Bellelli and Duchess Morbilli. In 1856 he traveled for the first time to Italy, where he intended to make the acquaintance of his Italian relatives. This journey, which was followed by another in 1858 and several more in 1859, was Degas’s real education. In Italy, Degas preferred the Quattrocento painters and the exponents of Florentine Mannerism.

The people Degas depicted in that time were almost all members of his family, especially his sisters and brothers, and himself. His early portraits achieve their culmination in his group portrait The Bellelli Family.

The present painting represents Hilaire de Gas, the painter’s grandfather.

After the death of Degas in 1917, around 150 half-disintegrated small wax and clay sculpture was found in his studio. These were free-standing figures, scarcely 45 cm high, representing racehorses, women bathing, and ballet dancers in particular. It only proved possible to restore 73 of them, which were subsequently cast in bronze, in limited editions of 22 at most. The present bronze, a horse bending its head to run forward, is one of a total of twelve surviving sculptures of horses.

The title of the painting, The Rape, may be misleading. It perhaps refers to a scene in Zola’s novel, “Madeleine F�rat,” in which Madeleine says to Francis that he is tormented because he loves her and she cannot be his. However, it is probably not a literary illustration. Degas himself never accepted this title. To his way of thinking the picture was primarily a study in nocturnal light effects in an interior.

Degas produced many portraits between 1865 and 1870, too, the major ones of which were Th�r�se de Gas, Double Portrait, The Collector, Madame Hertel, Duke and Duchess of Morbilli, Jacques Joseph (James) Tissot, Mademoiselle Dihau at the Piano, Madame Camus at the Piano, Portrait of Hortense Valpin�on as a Child.

Conventional as they may be, these portraits highlight both what is characteristic and what is casual in the personality and deportment of the sitter.

James Tissot was a French painter who spent part of his career in London.

Beside portraiture, Degas’s early work was also centred on historical themes drawn from religious tradition or mythology. Between 1860 and 1865 he painted five historical paintings, for which there are several sketches and versions: Young Spartans Exercising, Semiramis Founding a City, Alexander and Bucephalus, Jephthah’s Daughter, and The Sufferings of the City of New Orleans, the latter being his first entry at the Salon.

These paintings are very original and unlike any historical painting in the nineteenth century. They conformed to the rules of classicist composition, but they were also innovative because of the freshness of his figures and the warm colours of his landscapes.

The Jephthah’s Daughter is probably the most successful of these early pictures. It depicts a scene from the Old Testament. Jephthah was a great Old Testament (Judges 11:30-40) warrior, who was called upon to lead the Israelites in their war against the Ammonites. On the eve of the battle he made a pact with God, that, in return for victory, he would sacrifice ‘the first creature that comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return’. The battle won, ‘who should come out to meet him with tambourines and dances but his daughter, and she only a child’.

In this picture Degas’s interest is not so much in the fashionably dressed woman herself as in a certain tension of figure and space.

Degas had an immense repertoire of drawing techniques and idioms. Unusual precision and finesse were as much his as fast, sure-touch charcoal sketching. From preparatory drawings of details to drawings done in their own right, from charcoal drawings that used coloured pastel to loosely done gouaches, drawings for Degas were not a tiresome convention, but represented a challenge to experiment.

As in his painting, Degas aimed to change the art of sculpture, turning to real life for inspiration and experimenting with new materials and techniques in order to gain his desired effect. The use of everyday materials was one of the most revolutionary aspects of his work. While the cast bronze figure wears a gauze skirt and satin hair ribbon, the original tinted-wax sculpture had a wax-covered linen bodice, satin slippers, red lips, and even a horsehair wig. The expression on the model’s face is strained, emphasizing the difficulty of her artificial pose.

When the sculpture was first displayed in Paris at the Impressionist exhibition in 1881, the extreme realism of the Little Dancer repelled many viewers, who found the work brutal and coarse.

This statue of the fourteen-year-old dancer Marie van Goethem, a pupil at the �cole de Danse de 1’Op�ra, was a bone of contention. Degas made numerous sketches in preparation for this sculpture, drawing his model from different angles - from the rear, from the side, from the front - for the most part with the feet and arms in a memorable stance: the spine straight, the shoulders pulled back, the right foot forward to provide stability, and the arms behind the back with the hands touching. The little dancer holds her head tilted backwards.

Degas gave his polychrome wax figure artificial hair and silk ribbons, a corsage, and a tutu, as well as stockings and ballet slippers.

Degas showed his work in a specially made glass case. The critics were horrified. Degas’s crass realism was no less horrific to his contemporaries than his disregard for the current ideal of beauty.

Since 1880 Degas experimented with sculpture and he modeled more and more as his eyesight declined, making sculptures of ballerinas and horses. He sculpted in clay, wax and putty. After his death, about 150 small sculptural works were found in his studio. Only half of them were in a state to allow of bronze casts being taken.

At the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881 he showed his sculptures publicly for the first and only time. The reactions to the Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer were very different. Critics were especially provoked by Degas’s having clad his wax figure in a gauze tutu, satin shoes and pale yellow silk bow.

Since 1880 Degas experimented with sculpture and he modeled more and more as his eyesight declined, making sculptures of ballerinas and horses. He sculpted in clay, wax and putty. After his death, about 150 small sculptural works were found in his studio. Only half of them were in a state to allow of bronze casts being taken.

At the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881 he showed his sculptures publicly for the first and only time. The reactions to the Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer were very different. Critics were especially provoked by Degas’s having clad his wax figure in a gauze tutu, satin shoes and pale yellow silk bow.

Since 1880 Degas experimented with sculpture and he modeled more and more as his eyesight declined, making sculptures of ballerinas and horses. He sculpted in clay, wax and putty. After his death, about 150 small sculptural works were found in his studio. Only half of them were in a state to allow of bronze casts being taken.

At the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881 he showed his sculptures publicly for the first and only time. The reactions to the Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer were very different. Critics were especially provoked by Degas’s having clad his wax figure in a gauze tutu, satin shoes and pale yellow silk bow.

Degas produced many portraits between 1865 and 1870, too, the major ones of which were Th�r�se de Gas, Double Portrait, The Collector, Madame Hertel, Duke and Duchess of Morbilli, Jacques Joseph (James) Tissot, Mademoiselle Dihau at the Piano, Madame Camus at the Piano, Portrait of Hortense Valpin�on as a Child.

Conventional as they may be, these portraits highlight both what is characteristic and what is casual in the personality and deportment of the sitter. Although people are caught most of the time in a casual pose expressing the charm of a fleeting mood, formal behaviour breaks through sometimes, as in the Portrait of Madame Camus at the Piano. She was the wife of Doctor Camus, a friend of Manet and Degas and a lover of Japanese art, and she had an excellent reputation as a pianist. The painting still shows the faint influence of Ingres’s style, but it also evokes Manet in its refined elegance. In a masterful arrangement, the model sits in a room surrounded by angular shapes. The picture strikes a balance between a personal and an official portrait.

The portrait of Estelle Musson, the artist’s first cousin, was painted during Degas’s 1872-1873 visit to New Orleans. Not long after marrying Ren� de Gas, Estelle had gone blind. Degas shows her gaze by passing us, a vacant gaze bent upon vacancy. It is a discreet and simple portrait of one woman’s solitude and isolation.

Degas produced many portraits between 1865 and 1870, too, the major ones of which were Th�r�se de Gas, Double Portrait, The Collector, Madame Hertel, Duke and Duchess of Morbilli, Jacques Joseph (James) Tissot, Mademoiselle Dihau at the Piano, Madame Camus at the Piano, Portrait of Hortense Valpin�on as a Child.

Conventional as they may be, these portraits highlight both what is characteristic and what is casual in the personality and deportment of the sitter.

The Cirque Fernando was established in 1875, in 1890 it was renamed Cirque Medrano. It was a major attraction for Montmartre artists. In January 1879 Degas went there several times to see a mulatto trapeze artist who called herself Mlle La La. In the present painting Degas’s attention is on the visual interplay of artiste and architecture. Everything else (the trapeze, the ring, the audience) has been left out.

The sheer, angular viewpoint from below is a modern variation on Baroque sotto-in-su perspective.

This is a preparatory drawing for the painting The Orchestra at the Opera.

Degas produced many portraits between 1865 and 1870, too, the major ones of which were Th�r�se de Gas, Double Portrait, The Collector, Madame Hertel, Duke and Duchess of Morbilli, Jacques Joseph (James) Tissot, Mademoiselle Dihau at the Piano, Madame Camus at the Piano, Portrait of Hortense Valpin�on as a Child.

Conventional as they may be, these portraits highlight both what is characteristic and what is casual in the personality and deportment of the sitter.

This is a preparatory study for a painting in which the woman was not a singer at all, she was a well-known pianist, Alice Desgranges. Degas was not out to convey singing as performance, rather, he was exploring various shock effects produced by so extreme a close-up.

Since the 1830s, the opera houses, theatres and vaudeville shows had grown in number and importance in the new Paris. Artists were fascinated by famous caf�s among which the Caf� des Ambassadeurs was one of the oldest that offered musical entertainment. In the Song of the Dog (La Chanson du Chien) our gaze is drawn past the singer to the auditorium and the lighted garden. The singer is Emma Valadon. Ironically concentrating on the singer’s mimicry and gestures, Degas highlights the attentiveness with which the audience are following hr performance. The sheer visual wit of portraying the singer as she mimics the dog in her song is doubtless meant to underline the vulgarity of the song.

This painting is Degas’s second treatment of the subject. It opposes stage and pit as two halves of the pictorial space.

After 1880 Degas also explored the theme of women bathing. French artists devoted a significant part of their work to the praise of woman’s beauty, albeit less in the nineteenth than in the eighteenth century. Unlike to his predecessors, Degas describes intimate scenes without intimacy, bodies without sensuality. The women bathing, washing, drying themselves, combing their hair or having it combed, are mainly seen from behind. They do not seem to heed the intimacy of the boudoir or bathroom scene. Degas’s matter-of-fact depictions of woman was criticized by his contemporaries.

Degas’s pictures recorded images of life in a modern city. The present painting - probably destroyed in World War II - shows Baron Lepic and his daughters strolling along a boulevard. Lepic, art connoisseur and dog breeder is immaculately turned out. Cigar in mouth, one hand behind his back, an umbrella under his arm, he is walking across the empty Place de la Concorde with his daughters and dog.

This drawing is a study for the painting The Belleli Family.

This drawing is a study for the painting The Belleli Family.

This drawing is a study for the painting The Belleli Family.

Degas produced many portraits between 1865 and 1870, too, the major ones of which were Th�r�se de Gas, Double Portrait, The Collector, Madame Hertel, Duke and Duchess of Morbilli, Jacques Joseph (James) Tissot, Mademoiselle Dihau at the Piano, Madame Camus at the Piano, Portrait of Hortense Valpin�on as a Child.

Conventional as they may be, these portraits highlight both what is characteristic and what is casual in the personality and deportment of the sitter.

This drawing is a study for the painting Woman Leaning on an Elbow beside a Vase of Flowers.

Degas’s family were related to the Italian aristocracy, among them Baroness Bellelli and Duchess Morbilli. In 1856 he traveled for the first time to Italy, where he intended to make the acquaintance of his Italian relatives. This journey, which was followed by another in 1858 and several more in 1859, was Degas’s real education. In Italy, Degas preferred the Quattrocento painters and the exponents of Florentine Mannerism.

The people Degas depicted in that time were almost all members of his family, especially his sisters and brothers, and himself. His early portraits achieve their culmination in his group portrait The Bellelli Family.

Degas produced many portraits between 1865 and 1870, too, the major ones of which were Th�r�se de Gas, Double Portrait, The Collector, Madame Hertel, Duke and Duchess of Morbilli, Jacques Joseph (James) Tissot, Mademoiselle Dihau at the Piano, Madame Camus at the Piano, Portrait of Hortense Valpin�on as a Child.

Conventional as they may be, these portraits highlight both what is characteristic and what is casual in the personality and deportment of the sitter.

This study for an oil painting depicts in the centre the financier and collector Ernest May (1845-1925) under the portico of the Paris stock exchange. The larger, more finished oil painting is in the Mus�e d’Orsay, Paris.

The painting represents Lorenzo Pagans (1838-1883), a famous Spanish tenor and guitarist. and Auguste de Gas, the painter’s father.

Horse racing, a sport imported from England, was a novelty at that time. Degas discovered racetracks as a subject for art in the early 1860s. However, he rarely painted the course itself, he preferred to look elsewhere. He was fascinated by preparations for a race, by false starts and the wait before the start, by the tension and the release of tension - all of them moments hardly laden with action.

From 1872 on, Degas devoted most of his attention to ballerinas practicing under their master or rehearsing on stage, where occasionally gentlemen would be looking on and would afterwards express a wish to take one of the girls home with them.

The style of this painting resembles grisaille work. The non-colourful chiaroscuro is some kind of allusion to the new visual technique of photography. The man straddling the chair functions as an observer within the scene we observe; and we notice that not only the lighting but also the unaccustomed emptiness of the theatre makes an eerie impression.

There are three similar versions of this scene. The largest, painted in grisaille (Mus�e d’Orsay, Paris), appeared in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. The two others, tentatively dated the same year, are in the Metropolitan’s collection. Both works were executed over an ink drawing on paper, an unusual practice for Degas.

There are three similar versions of this scene, and their precise relationship has bedeviled scholars for decades. The largest, painted in grisaille (Mus�e d’Orsay, Paris), appeared in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. The two others, tentatively dated the same year, are in the Metropolitan’s collection. This painting probably preceded the version in pastel, which is more freely handled. The importance that Degas attached to the composition is evident in the preparatory drawings that he made for almost every figure, from the dancer scratching her back in the foreground to the woman yawning next to the stage flat.

Degas, as a young man, was very ambitious in some of his early works, tackling both portraiture and even historical painting. His self-portrait shows the 21-year-old painter as a reserved and even aloof observer. An overall sense of restraint permeates the painting.

Degas made nearly forty self-portraits between 1854 and 1864. During this period, he traveled extensively in Italy, studying Old Master paintings and developing his own style. The artist approached self-portraits as a platform for experimentation and most remained in his studio until his death.

In this image, Degas presents himself in a striking hat, white painting smock, and orange cravat. The delicate modeling of the face, much of which is in shadow, contrasts with the unpainted area in the bottom left corner.

This unfinished self-portrait shows a man not quite thirty, a stylish man of the middle class, with gloves and top hat, facing whatever the future may have in store with calm self-assurance.

In the early 1860s, Degas experimented with history paintings which never left his studio. One example is the Semiramis Building Babylon which may have been an allusion to the radical redesign of Paris being undertaken by Baron Haussmann.

In his closing decades Degas had a large circle of acquaintances and was a sociable man. He painted some further portraits, among them the unusual group portrait Six Friends of the Artist.

This drawing is one of the numerous studies related to Degas’s historical painting Young Spartans Exercising.

This charcoal drawing highlighted with pastel shows the same singer in the same pose from two different angles. Her pose is an attitude interpreting what she is singing. Degas has plainly been trying to find the best way to capture that image.

Degas had an immense repertoire of drawing techniques and idioms. Unusual precision and finesse were as much his as fast, sure-touch charcoal sketching. From preparatory drawings of details to drawings done in their own right, from charcoal drawings that used coloured pastel to loosely done gouaches, drawings for Degas were not a tiresome convention, but represented a challenge to experiment.

In this nude study, the posture of the young girl is identical with that of the final, clothed version. However, it is smaller as less-detailed in execution.

Most of all, Degas is interested in depicting a body in motion. His paintings and drawings of bathing women become a complete repertoire of every posture and movement of a woman in her bathroom.

The relation between the woman and the man in this genre picture is ambiguous. The sitters for the figures were the writer Edmond Duranty and the young model Emma Dobigny.

Since 1880 Degas experimented with sculpture and he modeled more and more as his eyesight declined, making sculptures of ballerinas and horses.

The Bath is not so much a genre scene (a woman at her toilette) as the insertion of a flexed body inside a circle.

Edgar Degas had come to Italy, where part of his family lived, in 1856. In Florence in 1858, he painted his portrait of the Belleli family, which represented his first brush with tradition. He worked on the picture for almost ten years before showing it under the title Family Portraits at the 1867 Salon in Paris, where it passed unnoticed. He did numerous detail studies (faces, hands) and packed the composition with deliberate meaning.

The picture portrays the domestic drama of a family exiled from Naples to Florence, much to the despair of Laura (his seriously depressive cousin) and her irascible husband Gennaro, who had no proper job and whom we see turning almost reluctantly to face his wife and daughters. The youngest, Giulia, sitting on a stool with one leg tucked under her, appears impatient, lending animation to the whole, while in the great tradition of group effigies from the classical era Degas includes a portrait of his grandfather Hilaire Degas, on the wall behind his daughter Laura. Hilaire had just died in Naples (in 1858), hence the dark mourning dress, alleviated only by the girls’ pinafores.

Around 1880 Degas’s grays gave way to brilliant colours, ranging from red to russet, and muted tones were replaced by warm ones. This came with a change in style and technique, in which pastels became his dominant medium. Degas was the only nineteenth-century painter who made pastels his primary medium. He saw that pastels struck a balance between painting and drawing, enabling him to paint while drawing. Furthermore, he expanded the possibilities offered by pastels by combining them with gouache, watercolour, oils mixed freely with turpentine, and even monotypes.

Degas’s later paintings of dancers remove the figures completely from the realist atmosphere of the stage. The luminous tracery of colours now reigns supreme. The dancers become the essence of rhythmic movement, pure emanations of colours.

Degas produced many portraits between 1865 and 1870, too, the major ones of which were Th�r�se de Gas, Double Portrait, The Collector, Madame Hertel, Duke and Duchess of Morbilli, Jacques Joseph (James) Tissot, Mademoiselle Dihau at the Piano, Madame Camus at the Piano, Portrait of Hortense Valpin�on as a Child.

Conventional as they may be, these portraits highlight both what is characteristic and what is casual in the personality and deportment of the sitter.

In the fall of 1872, Degas traveled to America with his brother Ren�, in order to visit two other brothers who settled as cotton traders in New Orleans. He remained there until April 1873. He found the exoticism of the “colonial” society of New Orleans very attractive.

Apart from a few portraits of relatives, Degas painted only one major work in New Orleans, The Cotton Exchange in New Orleans. This is a painting of interiors, revealing a new and very elaborate approach to group portraits. The artist’s uncle, Monsieur Musson, sits in the foreground, wearing a top hat and testing cotton samples. Ren� de Gas sits behind him, reading a newspaper, while the other brother, Achille, leans on the frame of a glass partition on the left.

This painting is one of Degas’s most mature works in his naturalistic style.