Edgar Degas

U3A ART HISTORY GROUP – EDGAR DEGAS

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Hilaire Germain Edgar de Gas was born into a prosperous French/Italian family, on 19 July 1834 at  8 rue Saint Georges, Paris, the premises of the Banque de Naples, which his father had founded.  Edgar was the eldest of three brothers and two sisters, Achille, Thérese, Marguerite and René his mother, Célestine Musson was from a French Creole, New Orleans cotton broking family.  Edgar’s maternal grandmother had died in 1819 and his grandfather, who was of French descent, took his five young children to France, where his daughter, Célestine, married Auguste de Gas in 1832 at the age of 16.

From the age of 11, Edgar boarded at the Lycée Louis le Grand, one of the oldest schools in Paris.  Past pupils included Voltaire, Robespierre, Gericault and Delacroix.  The Lycée provided a strictly classical education in Latin, Greek, philosophy and literature and very little in mathematics or science.  Contemporary poet Paul Valery, observed’ Neither cleanliness, nor the smallest notion of hygiene, nor even the pronunciation of our language, had any place in the programme of that incredible system,’ Edgar subsequently went to Law School to please his father but, after the first year, set up a rudimentary studio of his own   Quite soon, his father generously supported Edgar financially in his artistic ambitions.

In 1854, under the tutelage of Louis Lamothe, a worthy history painter, who had been a pupil of Ingres, he registered to copy paintings in the Louvre.  He worked for two years, preparing for the competitive examination to become a student at the  Ecole des Beaux Art.  He met Ingres, his idol who was 75 years old, several times, who told him to ‘draw lines and then to draw more lines’.

In comparison with the hedonistic, easy-going Renoir, the flamboyantly arrogant Gaugin, or the destructively intense Van Gogh, Degas seems to have been an aloof and very private man, inclined to cynicism.  He was also a pessimist, whose art lacked the joyous qualities associated with the paintings of Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley and Gaugin.

Degas’ painting of his younger brother Achille shows the family likeness

In April 1855, he obtained entry to the Ecole des Beaux Arts but, after only a few months, he left to study in Italy.  He was based in Rome for the next three years.  Because of his private income, he was able to study drawing and painting from the wealth of ‘old masters’ and antique statues in Italy.  As he became better known, Edgar joined the aristocratic ‘de‘and ’Gas’ of his surname, to become Degas.

He observed the street life in Rome and, like his contemporaries, painted pictures of beggars and peasants. An example of Degas’ work is A Roman Beggar Woman.

Until 1860 he made regular yearly visits to Italy and was warmly received by the family of his cousin, Giulia Bellelli.  He made pastel sketches of them, but did not work them up and complete them until after his return to Paris in 1859, in a new studio in rue Madame.

This unhappy family portrait shows Laure Bellelli, Edgar Degas’ aunt, with her two daughters and her husband Baron Bellelli, who had been exiled from Naples for political reasons.The straight lines and angles in this painting are inherited from the early Florentines and Holbein.  There is hidden tension between the standing mother and her daughters on the left and the seated father on the right. She later wrote to Edgar ‘To live with Gennaro, whose detestable character you know, and with him having no serious occupation, is something which will soon drive me to my grave’.

Whilst copying in the Louvre, Degas met Manet, the son of a lawyer.  They were both upper class Parisians of a similar age and became friends.  Manet was invited to the private music concerts, arranged by Degas’ father, August; in their rue Mondovi appartment and Degas accompanied Manet to the Café de Bade.  Here they met also Fantin Latour, Sisley, Renoir, Cézanne, Duranty and Zola.

In September and October 1861, Degas spent several weeks in Normandy with his friend Paul Vilpincon near the Le Pin stud farm; here he made his first studies of horses and jockeys.

Gentlemen Jockeys before the Start 1862 Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France

Racehorses at Longchamp 1874 National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., USA

Racehorses before the Stands 1872 Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France

In 1865, Degas painted A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers. Degas was not very keen to paint such still life subjects, probably due to the low stature of this genre. He painted it to show that he could.  He kept it for over 20 years and then sold it for 4,000 francs to the art dealer, Theo Van Gogh, brother of Vincent. At that time, this was the second highest sum he had received for a picture.

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Through his friend Desiré Dihau, bassoonist at the Opera, Degas met a number of the other musicians and he was able to study their facial expressions and techniques, in order to produce the Orchestra of the Opera 1869.

In 1870, Degas was 36 and volunteered to  serve in an artillery unit with Monet,  during the Franco-Prussian War.  His commanding Officer was his old school friend, Hennri Rouart, who remained a friend for life.

Degas’ brother, René, had come to Paris for a visit and, on his return to Louisiana in 1872, Degas accompanied him and spent six months in New Orleans (his mother’s birthplace). He stayed with his relatives and undertook a series of portraits of the family and also A Cotton Office in New Orleans 1873

This painting had a mixed reception but Degas sold it to the Musée des Beaux Arts in Pau for 2,000 francs.  He was delighted and wrote to them ‘I must thank you most warmly for the honour you have done me.  This is the first time that a museum has honoured me and this official recognition surprises and flatters me intensely‘. This scene includes his uncle and brothers. A few coloured scraps in a white paper basket and a sheet of blue paper on the desk, brighten up this muted picture.  Degas’ uncle, Michael Musson, sits in the foreground.

Degas was pleased to get back to his Paris studio in March 1873.  He remarked ’I want nothing but my own little corner‘.   He enjoyed theatre-going and, in addition to studying ballet dancers, he favoured painting those who participated in the professions, which also called for discipline and precision -  for example jockeys and their horses and acrobats.   He considered marriage, but his aloofness and uncertainty were not compatible with this plan. And perhaps his fear of an allegiance to anything except his art contributed to his decision…

He joined other artists, whose work had been rejected by the salon,  in organising a separate exhibition in 1874.  Paintings by Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne and Berthe Morisot were exhibited, but the separate exhibition met with hostility.  They became known as the ’impressionists’, a term used by a derogatory critic with reference to Monet’s ’Impression Sunrise’.

The Dance Class 1874 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US

The Dancing Class 1874 Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France

The grey-haired, 64 year old ballet master in this painting is Jules Perrot, one of the greatest male dancers of the previous generation.  Ballet masters are the only males in Degas’ pictures. Very few people in the painting are attentive to Perrot’s advice – they are adjusting their costumes or chatting together.  X-rays show that the dancer in the foreground is painted over two figures painted earlier.

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In contrast, L’Absinthe painted in 1876, depicts two friends of Degas, Marcello Deboutin, an artist, and Ellen Andrée, an actress and artists‘ model, at a table in the  Café de la Nouvelle Athenes.  This is more of a genre (everyday life) painting than a portrait.  The two figures are absorbed in their own thoughts and placed on the right hand side of the painting, a frequently used device of Degas.  Both were long-term friends of  Degas and, as portrayed here, Ellen Andrée is far less attractive than in life.  This painting contrasts sharply with the gaiety of the paintings of café life by Renoir and Manet, and exemplifying Degas’ serious nature.

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August de Gas always had a passion for music and played the organ weekly at a Parisian church. This picture shows the Spanish singer, Lorenzo Pagans performing at one of August’s Monday musical soirées, which Manet and his wife also attended.  Edgar’s father is shown in the painting, looking elderly and pensive. Pagans sang traditional Spanish love songs. This picture dated 1869 was prized by Degas and it was hung above his bed.

August died in 1874 and in 1875 Edgar’s brother, Achille, who was in charge of the family bank, lost everything, following unwise investments.  This state of affairs necessitated  that Edgar work even harder to assist his brother.  For the first time in his life, he tried to make a living by selling his pictures

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Degas loved the city and kept returning to portraiture.  He frequently used lamplight and the artificial lighting of the theatre.  Singers and dancers were highlighted from below by footlights, accentuating the heavily made-up faces as the Café Concert – At Les Ambassadeurs 1877

This was set in the open air in a kiosk under the trees in the Champs Elysées, where the audience would stroll past or stand without charge.  It was bawdy and working class entertainment. The colours are extremely bright and the atmosphere is lively.

This picture, which is in The National Gallery in London, shows a mulatto circus artist, Miss La La, known as ‘the canon woman’, from another of her strong-woman acts.  In this picture, as she is hauled up into the roof of the Cirque Fernando in Paris.  She is gripping the end of a rope with her teeth, as she stretches her arms and balances with clenched ankles.  It appeared in the fourth Impressionist exhibition of 1879.

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In 1881, Degas exhibited a statuette of a 14-year-old dancer, on which he had been working for years.  The body is dressed in a bodice of painted canvas with a skirt of gauze.  The bronze figure is arched and perfectly balanced and is 38½” tall.

A series of paintings, over a period of fifteen years, in which Degas was interested was depicting laundresses. These included women ironing and were all about the positions and stances of the women. In 1874, the novelist, Edmond de Goncourt wrote, ‘Yesterday, I spent the afternoon in the studio of a painter named Degas….he has fallen in love with the modern and in the modern, he has cast his choice upon laundresses and dancers …explaining to us technically the downward  pressing and the circular strokes of the iron.’

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Degas also painted a series of pictures of ladies at the milliners

In 1886, at the eighth and last of the Impressionist Exhibitions, Degas exhibited a series of pastels of nude women bathing, washing and drying themselves.  The women were observed without the aim to please.  The painter’s intention was to present a body caught from odd angles in unexpected foreshortenings, resulting in apparent distortions and disproportions.  No artist had previously painted the human body for its own sake.

In perfecting his pastel technique, Degas applied colours in successive layers, each coated with a fixative, before being covered with the next.  He was trying to recreate the transparent glazing of the Venetian masters, allowing the undercoat to show through here and there.

In his oils, Degas reverted to an old-fashioned technique, applying the colours with his finger; he spread them with the flat of his hand, going over the outline with a brush.

By this time, Degas was almost blind. His main concern was with movement, lines of force and the magic of colour.  He said, ‘They call me a painter of dancers, they don’t realise that for me, the dancer is a pretext for painting pretty materials and rendering movements’.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, Degas lived in Montmartre, in a three-storey house.  Despite the weakening of his eyesight, he carried on with large charcoal drawings, which he built up with successive tracings around the previous outlines.

With his weakened sight, only sculpture remained for him.  He became more gruff and temperamental.  In 1912, he had to leave his rented home when the building was torn down.  He took his vast collection and his own works to a new apartment in the Blvd de Clichy.  He stopped painting and walked the streets or took bus rides to the Paris suburbs.  He visited friends up until 1915 but after that he hardly left his apartment.  He died aged 83 on 27 September 1917.

Degas had been an art collector all his life.  Both old masters and contemporary artists were among his collection.  Apart from the period when he helped his brother financially, he was comfortably off and seldom sold his own work.  He owned works by El Greco, Ingres, Cézanne, Corot, Delacroix, Gaugin, Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Sisley, Van Gogh, Daumier and Forain.  He had considered donating his entire collection to a museum but had not made the arrangements and so his collection was auctioned after his death.

He never married, although he had relationships with women when he was much younger.  He considered that marriage and particularly children would be a distraction from his art.

DEGAS TALK – BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bade P            1992 Degas Studio Editions Limited, London

Bouret J           1965 Degas Thames & Hudson Limited, London

Catton Rich D      – Degas Harry N Abrams Inc., New York

Dunlop I          1979 Degas Thames & Hudson Limited, London

Milner F          1990 Degas Park Lane/Books and Toys Ltd

Roberts K        1976 Degas Phaidon Press Ltd., Oxford

Terrasse A       1988 Degas Cassell Publishers Ltd., London

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