Portraits by Degas

By Jean Sutherland Boggs

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520331495

Jean Sutherland Boggs

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CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF ART

Walter Horn, General Editor

I THE BIRTH OF LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN CHINA

By Michael Sullivan

II PORTRAITS BY DEGAS

By Jean Sutherland Boggs

PORTRAITS BY DEGAS

PORTRAITS BY

Degas

BY JEAN SUTHERLAND BOGGS

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles

1962

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

London, England

© 1962 by The Regents of the University of California

Published with the assistance of a grant from the Ford Foundation

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-11142

DESIGNED BY RITA CARROLL

Frontispiece Self-Portrait, ca, 1857, L. 32, oil on paper applied to canvas (9 7/8 x 7 1/4), collection Derrick Morley, Esq., Wickhambreaux, Kent.

Printed in the United States of America

To MY PARENTS

Acknowlegment

Many people and institutions have made this book possible. I should like to begin by expressing my gratitude to the owners, both public and private, of the works illustrated, for their permission to reproduce them and often for having provided the photographs as well. I am also indebted to the following people for having helped me in different ways as I collected the material or worked on the manuscript: William and Jean Arrowsmith, Françoise Bernhard, Vittoria Bradshaw, Richard F. Brown, Bradford Cook, Douglas Cooper, Charles Durand-Ruel, James Elliott, Alan Fern, Anne Freedberg, John Gere, A. F. G. Gow, Daniel Halévy, the late Mme Elie Halévy, Walter Horn, Mme Indig, Jorin Johns, André Malecot, Gordon Martin, John M. Maxon, Agnes Mongan, the Nepveu-Degas family in (Paris, A. Franklin Page, Haverly Parker, Frank Peris, Helmut Rip- perger, Mme Ernest Rouart, Germain Seligman, Peter Selz, Kate Steinitz, Frederick A. Sweet, and Vladimir Visson.

I began the work itself on a Sachs Travelling Fellowship from Harvard University in 1947. The American Philosophical Society gave me a grant for work the summer of 1957. And the Research Committee of the University of California has given me varying amounts toward the work over the six years I have taught on the Riverside campus. For all of these I have been most grateful. I am also very much indebted to the museums and libraries in which I have worked and in particular to the staffs of the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the library of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the library of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. I feel fortunate that the Los Angeles County Museum asked me to work on their Degas exhibition in 1958.

It does not seem amiss to thank the teachers I have had who have contributed, even if indirectly, to this work. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto I was reared as a potential art historian by Professors Peter Brieger and the late John Alford; the latter was the first to show me The Bellelli Family by Degas. Two of my professors at Harvard, who died this past year, Wilhelm Koehler and Chandler R. Post, were invariably encouraging. Professors Paul J. Sachs and Jakob Rosenberg transmitted their enthusiasm for Degas. Of all of them it was probably Frederick B. Deknatel, who saw me through my PhD. thesis on the Group Portraits by Degas, who has given me most support.

Finally perhaps my greatest debt is to those scholars who have worked in this field, including Miss Lillian Browse and Mr. John Rewald. Every step of the way I have been made conscious of the importance of the work of three French Degas scholars—the late Paul Jamot, the late Marcel Guerin, who edited Degas’ letters and collected many invaluable documents, and particularly M. Paul-André Lemoisne, who catalogued his work and who has been invariably kind to me whenever I have been in Paris.

J. S. B.

1960

Contents

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE 1853-1865

CHAPTER TWO 1865-1874

CHAPTER THREE 1874-1884

CHAPTER FOUR 1884-1894

CHAPTER FIVE 1894-1905

Epilogue

Notes

Selected Bibliography

APPENDIX A A COMPARATIVE CHART OF LEMOISNE’S AND AUTHOR’S DATING OF PORTRAITS BY DEGAS

APPENDIX B BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF SITTERS

Index

Plates

Introduction

Edgar Degas was an Impressionist painter.¹ He contributed to all but one of the eight exhibitions the Impressionists held in Paris between 1874 and 1886 and, like the others (particularly Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Cezanne), he developed a formal vocabulary to make his paintings produce the visual sensation —although selected and intensified—of something he might have seen. Instead of the countryside, however, it was Paris (where he was born in 1834 and died in 1917) which attracted him as a painter, and it was its theaters, its cafés, its Opera House, its studios, its race tracks, its worldly people which provided his subject matter; as a result, human beings appear more frequently in his paintings than in the work of the other Impressionists. Not only did he avoid the pastoral (even insisting that he painted his landscapes from moving trains)² but he refused to finish a work before his subject in the way that Monet, for example, painted his haystacks. Instantaneity, Degas would write and say, is photography and nothing more. ³ He belonged to the classical tradition with its emphasis upon drawing and a coordinated design—even when he was recreating the active and ephemeral. Perhaps because of this traditionalism and certainly because, among the Impressionists, he was, as his famous ballerinas and bathers reveal, the most preoccupied with human appearances, Edgar Degas gave portraiture its most characteristically Impressionist form.

It would be deceptive to think of Degas as a professional portrait painter. There is no record that he ever accepted a commission for a portrait and little evidence that he sold many portraits.⁴ In spite of his father’s warning to him early in 1859, that You know that you have little or no independent means and must make painting your career,⁵ portraits could have contributed little to his livelihood. Because he refused to be pretentious about his work (even calling his paintings ar- tides), he liked to grumble about the portraits he did paint, so that his father felt he must write: You find yourself bored painting portraits; you will have to overcome this eventually because they will be the most beautiful jewel in your crown. ⁶ But still Degas complained, in 1872 about the family portraits he was making in New Orleans: I have to make them close enough to the family’s taste, in impossible light, with everything disturbed, the models full of affection but a little shameless, treating me less seriously because I am their nephew or cousin, ⁷ or in 1884 about the bust he had been begged to make of Hortense Valpinçon, the daughter of a friend, of which he wrote the family watches … with more curiosity than tenderness.⁸ However, grumble as he might, more than one-fifth of Degas’ work could not be described other than as portraiture, and it more subtle and varied than any other painter’s in France in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Why did Edgar Degas paint portraits? At times he may have had to succumb to the pressure of his family and friends, but there were certain periods, for example about 1879, when his portraits were both spirited and voluntary. The answer is certainly in Degas the man, but Degas, who used to say, I want to be illustrious and unknown ⁹ was all too successful in this aim, and his personality and life remain elusive. Nevertheless it is apparent that he was neither politically nor religiously preoccupied and that, in a humanist fashion, he thought of the individual human being as free and important in himself; this alone could justify his portraiture.

Another explanation could be that Degas was a traditionalist, at least to the extent that he was not an iconoclast of the major figures of the past; indeed, he worshiped them. At the time of his death he owned one of Delacroix’ greatest portraits, the painting of Baron Schwiter (plate 2), now in the National Gallery in London, and at the same time, since he was not committed to either opposing school of painting, several by Ingres, including the portrait of M. Leblanc (plate 3), now in the Metropolitan Museum. It might be argued that Degas’ portraiture was an inevitable consequence of his admiration for paintings like these, in which a respect for the individual is fundamental, whether he be romantically vulnerable like Delacroix’ Baron Schwiter or as sensibly forthright as Ingres’ M. Leblanc. And it is true that Degas’ work does have its source in theirs, and that, in his painting as a whole, there is almost none of the social generalization which the painters of the intervening generation, like Courbet, Daumier, or Millet, were inclined to derive from the individual human being.

If we examine a small portrait of his from about 1876, The Impresario (plate 95), we find that Degas was, however, a more imaginative portrait painter than this traditionalism could explain. Certainly the impresario, even if we do not know his name, is as much an individual as Baron Schwiter or M. Leblanc, but he is moving, and through the freakish composition (we see him, after all, from the back) we are made more immediately responsive to him. This way of painting the individual as an intensification of an aspect of something seen, together with a consciousness of the passing of time, is perfectly consistent with Impressionism, particularly with Degas’ form of it, for Degas always focused more directly and sharply upon an object (usually a human being) than the other Impressionists did. In this concentration he was sensitive to individual differences —in movement, in gesture, in voice (he was a good mimic)—external differences largely, but through which a psychological state could be revealed. Even in his paintings of laundresses or ballerinas distinct personalities tend to assert themselves. He quite naturally, therefore, chose upon occasion to paint portraits.

The development in Degas’ portraiture to a form which was not inconsistent with Impressionism, and then beyond it, is predictably one of the principal themes of this book. This aspect, since it is by nature chronological, cannot have any meaning unless it is based upon securely dated works. Since Degas dated few paintings, reworked many, and had a habit (fortunately more rarely with portraits) of making a later version of a theme, it is difficult to be precise, and upon occasion I have had to be content only to fit works into the five periods into which I have divided his career. In all of this I have been much indebted to M. P.-A. Lemoisne for his catalogue raisonné of Degas’ paintings. I have usually accepted his dates but, when I have rejected any, I have felt I must justify my disagreement with him in the text or a footnote; Appendix A is a tabulation of these differences of opinion. His work has also relieved me of the obligation of including or cataloguing all of Degas’ portraits, although I have tried to bring the entries up to date when the paintings have changed hands. I can only wish M. Lemoisne’s volumes on the drawings were published so that I could make use of that valuable material as well.

A basic part of the development of Degas’ portraiture which is less easy to catalogue is a change in his attitude from a fairly romantic one at the beginning of his career to an acceptance of the sitters as a physical, social fact in the sixties, to a more humorous, often caustic, approach in the seventies, and, finally, to a deepening pessimism in which individual distinctions are ultimately lost. At the core of this again is Degas himself, who has left little evidence of having been a philosopher but who must, nevertheless, have had some basis for considering the individual human being important and for later changing his attitude toward him. What material I have found about this aspect of Degas I have quoted in the text and, for the sake of readability, in translations which, unless they are otherwise acknowledged, are my own.

Since Degas’ sitters were usually his relatives or friends, his relationship to them becomes important, for the portraits must have meant more to him than the record of something accidentally seen. Who his sitters were, when and how Degas knew them, is information against which to assess what Degas, in his portraits, does or does not tell us of them. What I have been able to discover about the sitters I have placed either in the text or in the biographical dictionary of sitters in Appendix B with a confidence that Degas was sufficiently involved with them to make such information relevant. What we learn from the portraits about his attitude toward his family and friends can be, in addition, more revealing about Degas than any biography of him yet written.

Finally Degas’ portraiture, although a subject in itself, must also be considered against the painting of the period in which it was produced. Degas had known most of the conservative painters of his generation, like Bonnat, Delaunay, Lerolle, Fantin-Latour, and Moreau, from attending Lamothe’s classes in Paris, visiting at the Villa Medici in Rome, or copying in the Louvre, but he was closer, as a painter, to Manet and the other Impressionists. He was sympathetic to the next generation of revolutionary painters, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Toulouse- Lautrec, and he knew even more intimately the popular successes of their time, Boldini, John Singer Sargent, and Jacques-Emile Blanche. Thus he was aware of all the principal currents in contemporary portrait painting, so that some juxtaposition of his work with theirs seems justified when it can make his works more meaningful or can help with the evaluation of his contribution to portrait painting.

If any defense needs to be made for a serious consideration of Degas’ portraiture as an independent study, I trust that the plates—selected though they must be—will provide it.

CHAPTER ONE 1853-1865

The earliest important works by Edgar Degas were portraits. If, before he went to Italy in 1856, the twenty-two-year-old Degas took time to examine his drawings of his sister Marguerite and his paintings of his brothers René and Achille and of himself, he must have felt a certain satisfaction. How had he managed to become a successful portrait painter so early? His grades in drawing at his lycée, Louis-le-Grand, had been mediocre.¹ His career at the Ecole des Beaux- Arts was short and apparently unsatisfactory; ² as an older man he told his friend Lafond that its teaching was pernicious and unwholesome.³ However, in spite of his resentment later of the training he had had with Barrias ⁴ before entering the School of Law in 1853, with Louis Lamothe⁵ after he had rebelliously left it in 1854, and finally at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1855,⁶ he must somehow have been given a solid foundation by these academically trained painters to have been able to produce such skillful portraits so early.

His teacher Lamothe, who had studied with Ingres and Flandrin (whom Ingres considered an unusually gifted pupil),⁷ would have encouraged any of his students to revere the work of the greatest portrait painter of the period, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Degas must have been particularly susceptible to such advice, because, when he was able to afford to buy works by Ingres, he did, and by the time he died owned thirty-seven drawings and twenty paintings by this artist.⁸ It was probably about 1855 that Degas had his only meeting with Ingres, then seventy-five years old, an occasion he later loved to describe in versions ranging from a sacred pilgrimage to a farce, but always including Ingres’ advice: Draw lines, young man, draw lines. ⁹ It was also at this time that he persuaded a school friend’s father, M. Valpinçon, to change his mind and lend his great Bather by Ingres to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855.¹⁰ Probably before the fair itself Degas had made hesitant sketches from three Ingres paintings, Roger and Angelica, Cherubini and the Muse, and the Valpinçon Bather¹¹ Degas’ banker father, who used to give him interesting if presumptuous advice once he was reconciled to Edgar’s becoming a painter rather than a lawyer or a businessman, found Ingres on the whole inferior to the artists of the Italian Renaissance but did approve of his influence as a form of discipline because One ought to recognize nevertheless that if painting is called upon to have a Renaissance in this century Ingres will have powerfully contributed to it by showing the way. ¹² And Edgar did follow in Ingres’ path, guided more by the painter’s works themselves than by his style filtered through Lamothe and Flandrin; his early portraits reveal it in their precision, their finish, and their very formality.

All Degas’ teachers were conservative academicians who believed their work to be an extension of the classical tradition and therefore encouraged any young student to study and copy the art of the past, particularly classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. M. Lemoisne, the cataloguer of Degas’ work, has shown that Degas, then a pupil of Barrias, registered as early as 1853 at the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale,¹³ the best place at that time to study reproductions of works of art; it must have become a habit because five years later, before the Giotto school frescos at Assisi, which he did not have time to study, Degas consoled himself that: As soon as I’m in Paris I must go to the Bibliothèque. ¹⁴ One of his notebooks, now in the reserve section of this same Cabinet des Estampes, might easily have been produced within its walls; it is not dated but seems stylistically the earliest of their twenty-eight notebooks and probably dates from 1853.¹⁵ In it Degas copied prints of Leonardo’s work, many of them grotesque caricatured heads; these show his interest in different and even exaggerated facial expressions and formations. There are also notes and drawings from Jean Cousin’s Bool(on Proportions, studied with a youthful earnestness.

Degas made other copies and studies which are relevant to a consideration of his portrait painting. On a trip to Provence in July 1854, he sketched a Portrait of a "Young Man, then attributed to Raphael, in the museum in Montpellier.¹⁶ In the fall of the same year he copied another work given to Raphael, Francia- bigio’s Portrait of a Young Man (plate 4) in the Louvre, as well as Bronzino’s Portrait of a Sculptor (plate 5) in the same museum. He also made a sketch from Domenico Puligo’s Pietro Carnesecchi, possibly in reproduction.¹⁷ We can reasonably ask why these portraits among the rest in these museums should have attracted the twenty-year-old Degas. In all of them there is a sense of strongly defined pattern, with shapes of a certain character. The sitters are somewhat romanticized and vaguely discontent. They are male but not particularly virile; indeed they come close to effeminacy in their languor, in their gestures, and in their soft, sensual mouths. It would be unwise to jump to a sudden conclusion on the basis of his copies of these Mannerist portraits because that same year Degas copied Ingres’ portrait of Cherubini and the Muse and Andrea da Solario’s of Charles of Amboise,¹⁸ which are psychologically quite different, but undoubtedly Degas did find in them some response to the vague sadness and romanticism of his own personality at this time.

Degas must have been a quiet but recalcitrant student (in contrast to Manet, who rebelled openly but remained in Couture’s studio six years) and, although he might have won the approval of messieurs Barrias and Lamothe by worshiping Ingres and