Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas
Paris 1834 - 1917
16
Study of a Female Nude, Seated Cross-Legged, with her Head Held Back
Oil on board. Signed lower right in pale brown paint: degas.
34.8 x 26.5 cm (13 5 /8 x 10 1 /2 in.)
Provenance: Bears the Atelier stamp verso L.657;
Atelier Degas, inventory number: 842 (inventory
photograph no.1832; Durand-Ruel photograph
no.15344, these numbers confirmed by the Durand-
Ruel archive of Durand-Ruel et Cie 1 ); by descent
through the artist’s family; Sam Salz, New York; Sale,
Sotheby’s, London, 6 th December 1979, lot 518; Private
Collection.
Degas was born into a prosperous and cultivated family.
He was educated in Paris in the rigorous Lycée manner
and from an early age his father encouraged him to
visit the Louvre and study the old masters. At the age
of 18 he received formal permission to copy in the
Louvre and two years later joined the Ecole des Beaux
Arts, where under the direction of Louis Lamothe, a
disciple of Ingres, he was able to concentrate on his
draughtsmanship. A series of trips to Italy during the
1850s completed his education and his first successful
admission to the Salon in 1865 was with a history
painting: The Misfortunes of the City of Orléans, in
which the figures appear in poses redolent of classical
friezes and the Italian sixteenth century masters. Degas’s
focus changed rapidly soon after this and abandoning
academic subjects he turned to the world around him for
1. Degas, Seated Nude, pastel, Stiftung Langmatt.
his subjects: portraits of his friends, scenes from the race
course, the life of the cafés and most famously, the ballet.
By the 1870s he had become part of the avant-garde
community of artists which included Edouard Manet,
Claude Monet, Renoir and Sisley. Together they formed
the Société Anonyme des Artistes and from 1874 began
exhibiting under the title Les Impressionistes, although
Degas himself always called himself a ‘Réaliste’. Degas
continued to show his work with this group for the
next 12 years and in the last exhibition he entered
ten paintings of nude bathers which created a public
storm. Prolific and experimental, he created series
after series of studies in all media, endlessly adapting
the angle of his viewpoint and putting the discipline
of his youthful training into an unswerving attention
to pose and movement. Esoteric and open minded in
his interests he formed a considerable collection of the
works of old and contemporary masters and absorbed
and then expressed in his compositions his fascination
with Japanese prints and the advances of photography.
The onset of a slow decline in his eyesight made Degas
increasingly introverted and misanthropic but it did not
stop him working and he maintained his studio until
just a few years before his death.
This fascinating and highly spontaneous example of
Degas’s oil sketch technique, belongs with the studies of
nudes and of dancers made in the late 1870s and early
1880s. It combines his instinctive draughtsmanship
with an experimental use of oil; the outlines of the
figure are sketched with a fine brush and brown paint,
most expressively in tracing the angle of the neck as
the head tilts back. This is a technique which can also
be clearly seen in the portrait of Hortense Valpinçin
of 1871, now in the Minneapolis Institute of Art,
which was illustrated on the front cover of the 1988-
9 monographic exhibition catalogue 2 . Scumbling
and sweeping zigzags of paint in green and grey and
then brown and blue differentiate the ground from the
background and, in the white-cream oil he has used
to lay out the figure’s skin, most remarkably the artist’s
fingerprints are clearly visible around the chest and
stomach and along the calf muscle. Comparisons are
obvious with a drawing in charcoal of a seated female
figure, which appeared in the 4 th atelier sale: her head is
also tilted back and she leans on her outstretched arms,
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