Edgar Degas - Sulking [c.1870]

Edgar Degas - Sulking [c.1870], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Like several of Degas' genre pictures from the late 1860s and early 1870s, this painting seems to reflect a literary or theatrical source. None has been found, yet the drama that exists between the man and woman continues to invite speculation. Are they a husband and wife, a man and his lover, a father and his daughter, a banker and his client, a woman placing bets on horse races? The ambiguity of the relationship harbours an endless fascination. 

The picture's anecdotal character is reminiscent of Victorian painting, which Degas studied in the British section of the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. When he was working on this canvas, Degas was closely allied with James Tissot, the most Anglophilic of French artists. Degas asked the writer Edmond Duranty and the young model Emma Dobigny, who had been a favorite of Corot, Puvis, and Tissot, to pose for him. The racing print behind them is Degas's careful copy of a colour lithograph by J. F. Herring.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 32.4 x 46.4 cm]

Edgar Degas - Three Dancers Preparing for Class [after 1878]

Edgar Degas - Three Dancers Preparing for Class [after 1878], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The seated dancer in this pastel was derived from a study dated December 1878 of the fifteen-year-old Melina Darde. That drawing and those which explored the poses of the two dancers in the foreground belonged to a stock of figure drawings that Degas used for his larger compositions. There is another variant of this pastel also of the mid-1880s (Private collection).

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Pastel on buff-coloured wove paper, 54.6 x 52.1 cm]

Edgar Degas - Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage [c.1874]

Edgar Degas - Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage [c.1874], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

There are three similar versions of this composition. The largest, painted in grisaille (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), was shown in the first Impressionist exhibition, in 1874. The two other works, tentatively dated the same year, are in the Metropolitan's collection. This painting probably preceded the version in pastel, which is more freely handled. Preparatory drawings exist for almost every figure in the rehearsal compositions.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil colours freely mixed with turpentine, with traces of watercolor and pastel over pen-and-ink drawing on cream-coloured wove paper, laid down on bristol board and mounted on canvas, 54.3 x 73 cm]

Edgar Degas - Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers [1865]

Edgar Degas - Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers [1865], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The novelty of this composition has prompted many writers to suggest that the seated woman was an afterthought. Although there remains some doubt, she is probably the wife of Degas's school friend Paul Valpinçon. Degas immensely enjoyed his visits to their country house, Ménil-Hubert, and the presence of dahlias, asters, and gaillardias in the bouquet makes it likely that this work was painted there in August or September 1865. It was preceded by an exquisite pencil drawing of the sitter, also dated 1865. Far from representing an afterthought, her presence in the composition was deliberate and intentionally provocative. As Degas himself once said, "I assure you that no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament."

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.7 cm]

Edgar Degas - The Ballet Class [c.1880]

Edgar Degas - The Ballet Class [c.1880], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In this everyday scene from backstage at the Paris Opéra, a ballet instructor observes two young dancers while a mother sits reading in the foreground. Degas spent a great deal of time in the corridors and rehearsal rooms of the Opéra, where he would have seen mothers like this one managing their young daughters' careers. Girls began official ballet classes at age seven or eight in hopes of becoming premiere dancers by their late teens.

[Philadelphia Museum of Art - Oil on canvas, 82.2 x 76.8 cm]

Edgar Degas - Self-Portrait with Christine and Yvonne Lerolle [probably 1895-96]

Edgar Degas - Self-Portrait with Christine and Yvonne Lerolle [probably 1895-96] , a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Degas's brief but passionate involvement with photography resulted in a small body of fascinating and engaging pictures. Most of his surviving photographs are figure studies, self-portraits, and portraits of his intimate circle of friends - the families of Ludovic Halévy, Stéphane Mallarmé, Henry Lerolle, Auguste Renoir, Jacques-Emile Blanche, and others-in settings suggestive of realms more psychological than physical. In this magical image, one of Degas' finest, the artist himself seems to lean back deep in thought, conjuring up an image of youthful feminine grace in the form of the white-clad Lerolle daughters.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Gelatin silver print, 37.1 x 29.3 cm]

Edgar Degas - Interior [c.1868]

Edgar Degas - Interior [c.1868], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

After years of ambitious if equivocal attempts at monumental paintings on grand historical themes, by the late 1860s Edgar Degas increasingly turned to depictions of modern subjects. The dramatic play of artificial light and evening shadow in this painting, and the palpable sense of anxiety it transmits, are unique in Degas's scenes of private life. 

Although it is not without discrepancies in detail, the most convincing identification of the subject, proposed by the Degas scholar Theodore Reff, is that it illustrates a scene from Emile Zola's novel Thérèse Raquin (1867). Reunited on their wedding night, one year after they have killed Thérèse's husband, the lovers are overwhelmed by the enormity of their crime and retreat from one another into bitter isolation. 

Degas himself referred to it as "my genre picture," and it may have been intended for British collectors who appreciated the psychological tension in narratives painted by artists such as Sir John Everett Millais and Degas's friend James Tissot. The alternate title, The Rape, by which the picture also has long been known, does not seem to derive from Degas himself. 

[Philadelphia Museum of Art - Oil on canvas, 81.3 x 114.3 cm]

Edgar Degas - The Dancing Class [c.1870]

Edgar Degas - The Dancing Class [c.1870], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This is the very first of Degas's innumerable scenes of ballet dancers going through their paces in the studios and rehearsal rooms of the Paris Opéra. Late in his life, when he looked again at these early pictures, Degas lamented that he no longer had the eyes for such exacting work. When he painted this small picture, for which there are many large study drawings, he did not yet have privileges to go backstage at the Opéra, then on the rue Le Peletier. In the late 1870s, Degas explained, "I have done [painted] so many of these dance examinations without having seen them that I am a little ashamed of it."

The dancer at the centre of the composition is Joséphine Gaujelin (or Gozelin), whom Degas also portrayed in a stunning portrait (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston). Here, she awaits the starting note from the ballet master. The watering can, the top hat as music holder, and the empty violin case are accessories that the artist would continue to use to enliven his ballet pictures. Similarly, the poses that Degas established here would recur in his work until the end of his life.

[Metropolitan Museum of Art - Oil on wood, 19.7 x 27 cm]

Edgar Degas - Convalescent [c.1872-87]

Edgar Degas - Convalescent [c.1872-87], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Although the identity of the sitter in this portrait is a mystery, Edgar Degas conveyed her character by capturing the overwhelming sorrow to which she has succumbed. Posed with her head tilted and leaning against the back of her left hand, she appears weary. Her languorous expression and red-rimmed eyes, together with the limp right arm hanging at her side, suggest a physical or emotional malady, though nothing in the painting confirms the cause of her affliction. Hidden beneath a brown robe and full white gown, her pose is ambiguous; it is unclear if she sits, stands, or leans. The Convalescent attests to Degas's interest in the world of women - their physical characteristics and surroundings, and their complex emotional and psychological conditions. 

Unlike traditional nineteenth-century portraits, which were commissioned and usually left the artist's studio upon completion, this depiction of an unidentified woman remained in Degas's studio for at least fifteen years. The painting is unconventional in other ways as well; The Convalescent is more psychologically suggestive and spatially ambiguous than typical portraits of the time, such as Franz Xaver Winterhalter's official portrait, Leonilla, Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn. Degas's thick, unblended brushstrokes and flattened space bring the figure forward, conveying informality and intimacy.

[Oil on canvas, 25.625 x 18.5 inches]

Edgar Degas - The Dance Class [1874]

Edgar Degas - The Dance Class [1874], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

When this work and its variant in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, were painted in the mid-1870s, they constituted Degas's most ambitious figural compositions except for history paintings. Some twenty-four women, ballerinas and their mothers, wait while a dancer executes an attitude for her examination. Jules Perrot, one of the best-known dancers and ballet masters in Europe, conducts the class. The imaginary scene is set in a rehearsal room in the old Paris Opéra, a poster for Rossini's Guillaume Tell is on the wall beside the mirror, even though the building had just burned to the ground. 

The painting was commissioned in 1872 as part of an arrangement between Degas and the singer and collector Jean-Baptiste Faure. It was one of only a few commissions that the artist ever accepted, and the painting was delivered in November 1874 after two years of intermittent work.

[Oil on canvas, 83.5 x 77.2 cm]

Edgar Degas - Self-Portrait [c.1857-58]

Edgar Degas - Self-Portrait [c.1857-58], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

In this self-portrait a young Edgar Degas turns his head to look out at the spectator. He wears casual clothes, including an open collar and broad brimmed hat. The informal, extreme close-up view of Degas's face and his impassive, almost sullen expression echo the unpretentiousness of his clothing. The small-scale, informal presentation and lightness of touch emphasise the intimacy of this image and the still-tentative character of the young artist. 

Around 1857, when he was twenty-three or twenty-four, Degas travelled to Italy, where he spent much of his time making copies after Renaissance masters. The period was one of self-education and he drew prolifically, writing in one of his notebooks, "I must thoroughly realize I know nothing at all; it is the only way to get ahead." Finding in himself a willing sitter, he made fifteen or more self-portraits in various media during his time in Italy.

[Oil on paper, laid down on canvas, 8.25 x 6.375 inches]

Edgar Degas - A Beach Scene [c.1869-70]

Edgar Degas - A Beach Scene [c.1869-70], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

This picture has been dated to about 1876-77 but it may have been painted as early as the late 1860s. It was exhibited at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877. It is almost certain that the central group of a young girl and maid was posed in the studio. In treatment the painting is distinct from the 'open-air' beach scenes of the artist's contemporaries, Claude-Oscar Monet and Eugene Boudin.

[Oil (essence) on paper on canvas, 47.5 x 82.9 cm]

Edgar Degas - Four Dancers [c.1899]

Edgar Degas - Four Dancers [c.1899], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Degas frequented the ballet and opera, where he found subjects not only in performance but also within the unexpected frames created by the angles of stage wings and practice-room mirrors.

He never accepted the label impressionist, and his momentary, snapshot-like views result, not from spontaneous improvisation, but from deliberate arrangement. An avid photographer, his compositions were often influenced by that new medium. Here, for example, the figures are clustered to the left, some cut off at the picture edge. We cannot even be certain that it is four dancers we see - perhaps, instead, this is a single figure, moving as in the sequential photographs of running horses and men by Eadweard Muybridge

The sketchy background of the stage set, painted in a broad, almost blurry manner, is typical of Degas' late works, but he trains a sudden sharp focus on the dancers' backs. Our eye follows the linked movements of their arms, as Degas described in a sonnet: "The ribbon of her steps twists and knots...."

[Oil on canvas, 151.1 x 180.2 cm]

Edgar Degas - The Dance Lesson [c.1879]

Edgar Degas - The Dance Lesson [c.1879], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Degas was interested in the natural cycles of activity and rest that he observed behind the scenes at the Opera House. In The Dance Lesson, he focused on these in-between times when the dancers, released briefly from their strenuous practice regimen, could relax. In Before the Ballet, he depicted the entire cycle of activity and rest in one painting. Degas greatly admired the young dancers’ athleticism and controlled energy; he tried to capture the tension inherent in the life of a working ballerina in his painting.

Edgar Degas - Horses in a Meadow [1871]

Edgar Degas - Horses in a Meadow [1871], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on canvas, 31.8 x 40 cm]

Edgar Degas - Horses in a Meadow [1871]

Edgar Degas - Horses in a Meadow [1871], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on canvas, 31.8 x 40 cm]

Edgar Degas - Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando [1879]

Edgar Degas - Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando [1879], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The acrobat Miss La La caused a sensation when she performed at the Cirque Fernando in Paris. Here she is shown suspended from the rafters of the circus dome by a rope clenched between her teeth. Degas sought out such striking modern subjects, concentrating on figures in arresting poses. In January 1879 he make a series of drawings at the Cirque Fernando including a pastel study of Miss La La (London, Tate Gallery), which culminated in this painting. We view the spectacle as the audience would have done, gazing up at the daring feat taking place above. The painting was exhibited at the fourth Impressionist exhibition held in April 1879.

[Oil on canvas, 117.2 x 77.5 cm]

Edgar Degas - Woman Ironing [c.1876-87]

Edgar Degas - Woman Ironing [c.1876-87], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Women at work provided inspiration for Degas. In addition to ballet dancers and cabaret singers, he also painted milliners and dressmakers, laundresses and ironers - such as the young woman here. Laundresses also appeared as characters in newly popular realistic novels, which detailed the difficult lives of these women. They worked long, hot hours for low wages, and because they wore loose clothing and made deliveries to men's apartments, their morals were often questioned. Degas, however, seems not to have been interested in their social situation so much as in their characteristic gestures - in the line of his ironer's body as she leans into her work, in the soft curtain of colour provided by the garments that hang around her, in the crisp shirt folded on the table.

[Oil on canvas, 81.3 x 66 cm]

Edgar Degas - At the Milliner's [1882]

Edgar Degas - At the Milliner's [1882], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Mary Cassatt was the model for the customer in this work and also for another in the milliner series (Museum of Modern Art, New York). She purportedly said that she posed for Degas (French, 1834 – 1917) "only once in a while when he finds the movement difficult and the model cannot seem to get his idea." This pastel was shown in the final Impressionist exhibition, in 1886.

[Pastel on grey paper]

Edgar Degas - Young Spartans Exercising [c.1860]

Edgar Degas - Young Spartans Exercising [c.1860], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Plutarch writes of Lycurgus, the legislator of ancient Sparta, ordering Spartan girls to engage in wrestling contests; here they urge the boys to fight. An early work, probably begun about 1860. The painting was reworked several times, and numerous related drawings and studies survive, for example a study in oils in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although listed in the catalogue for the 1880 Impressionist exhibition, it was not shown and remained in the artist's studio until his death.

[Oil on canvas, 109.5 x 155 cm]