The Fitzwilliam Museum - University of Cambridge

Eugène Boudin (1824-1898) Sunset on the beach
of its permanent collection. A show need not be
showy to be successful. Though almost everything in
the exhibition could usually be seen in the Museum,
the unfamiliar surroundings of the beautifully lit
Mellon Gallery made the very familiar seem fresh.
The largely chronological hang also enabled illuminating
comparisons to be made, especially those between
paintings and drawings, the latter seldom brought out
from their boxes behind the scenes because of their
light-sensitive nature.
Especially striking was the number of
uncharacteristic but instructive works by major
artists in the show – for example, those clumsily
temperamental early Cézannes (The Abduction;
Uncle Dominique) that mark surely the least
auspicious start to the career of any major painter.
There was also the Gauguin landscape of 1873,
done when he was still a stockbroker and hugely
accomplished Sunday painter.
There were, most instructive of all, several
seemingly atypical pictures by Degas. True, classic
examples of ballet dancers and women washing
were on show, as well as a group of small, recently
given, models in wax and bronze of dancers and
horses. Far less familiar and thus more intriguing was
such evidence of Degas’s conservatism as the pencil
drawing after Donatello’s David or the chalk and
charcoal copy of Antonis Mor’s portrait of Elisabeth
de Valois. Both testify to Degas’s early brilliance as a
draftsman and to his admiration of Ingres. His
vigorous oil sketch for a painting of David and
Goliath also shows his interest in history painting,
the sort of subject that Monet, for one, would not
have touched with a double-length maulstick.
11
Exhibitions
LEFT
Hilaire-Germain
Edgar Degas (1834-
1917) Arabesque over
the right leg, left arm
in front