Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) 1443874493, 9781443874496

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Mapping Degas

Mapping Degas Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) By

Roberta Crisci-Richardson

Mapping Degas: Real Spaces, Symbolic Spaces and Invented Spaces in the Life and Work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) By Roberta Crisci-Richardson This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Roberta Crisci-Richardson All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7449-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7449-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ................................................................................... viii Acknowledgements ................................................................................... xii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ............................................................................................... 35 Paris 1. Businessmen 2. Auguste Degas 3. Right Bank 4. Left Bank 5. Self-Portraits Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 71 Italy 1. What Degas found in Italy 2. “Rubens, what for?” Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 84 History Painting 1. The Studio, 13 rue de Laval 2. The Bellelli Family 3. History Paintings/Exceptional Women 4. Mademoiselle d’Orléans Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 114 Normandism 1. Horse-Racing 2. Norman Landscapes 3. The Channel Coast

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Table of Contents

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 140 Degas’s Iconography 1. Self-referential portraiture 2. Pauline de Metternich and Other Monsters 3. Painting and Social Life 4. Musical Evenings 5. Top Hats 6. Place de la Concorde Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 182 Taking the City 1. The Louvre and the City 2. The Road from Holland 3. The rue Laffitte 4. The Café 5. The Impressionist Installations Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 223 The Paris Opera 1. The Orchestra of the Opera 2. Theatre Scenes before 1870 3. Dance Classes 4. The Dancer Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 246 The Body of the Artist 1. The Abelardian Ideal 2. “Good food, healthy living...” Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 258 Degas’s Avant-garde 1. The Franco-Prussian War 2. The Commune 3. Degas during the Commune 4. Collaboration 5. Revolutionary Impressionists Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 292 “Leave me on my dung-hill” 1. Degas’s fin-de-siècle 2. Maison d’artiste

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Conclusion ............................................................................................... 322 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 325 Index ........................................................................................................ 372

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1-1 Portrait of René-Hilaire Degas, 1857, oil on canvas, cm 53 x 41, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. ©RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski Fig. 1-2 Auguste Degas and Lorenzo Pagans, 1871-72, oil on canvas, cm 54.5 x 40, Musée d’Orsay. ©Musée d'Orsay, RMN-Grand Palais /Patrice Schmidt Fig. 1-3 Self-Portrait with Charcoal, 1855, oil on canvas, cm 81 x 64, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.©RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski Fig. 2-1 Portrait of Gustave Moreau, 1860, oil on canvas, cm 40 x 22, Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris. ©RMN-Grand Palais/Droits résérvés Fig. 2-2 Study of Hands, 1858, oil on canvas, cm 38x 46, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. ©RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay)/ Hervé Lewandowski Fig. 3-1 The Bellelli. Family, 1858-67, oil on canvas, cm 200 x 250, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.©RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski Fig. 3-2 Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli, c.1865, oil on canvas, cm 117.2 x 89.7, Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Fig. 3-3 Portrait of Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli, 1865, oil on canvas, cm 116.5 x 88.3, Gift of Robert Treat Paine, 2nd, 31.33, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Fig. 3-4 Alexander and Bucephalus, 1861-62, oil on canvas, cm 115 x 89, Bequest of Lore Heinemann in memory of her husband Dr Rudolf J. Heinemann, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Fig. 3-5 The Daughter of Jephthah, 1859-1861, oil on canvas, cm 195.58 x 298.45, The Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. Purchased with the Drayton Hillier fund SC 1933:9-1 Fig. 3-6 The Young Spartans Exercising, c. 1860-62, oil on canvas, cm 109.5 x 155, The National Gallery, London Fig. 3-7 Semiramis Building Babylon, c.1860-62, oil on canvas, cm 150 x 258, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. ©RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski

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Fig. 3-8 Scene of War in the Middle Ages, 1863-65, essence on paper mounted on canvas, cm 83 x 145, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. ©RMNGrand Palais (Musée d'Orsay)/Gérard Blot Fig. 3-9 Charles Dauphin, The Massacre of the Niobids, oil on canvas, cm 213 x 350, Galleria Sabauda, Turin. © Su concessione del Ministero dei Beni Culturali Fig. 4-1 At the Races, 1860-62, oil on canvas, cm 43.3 x 65.5, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Schenkung Martha und Robert von Hirsch, Basel, 1977. Photocredit: Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. BĦhler Fig. 4-2 The Gentlemen’s Races, 1862, reworked in 1882, oil on canvas, cm 48.5x61.5, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay)/Adrien Didlerjean Fig. 4-3 Scene from The Steeplechase. The Fallen Jockey, 1866 (reworked 1880 and 1897), oil on canvas, cm 180 x 152, Paul Mellon collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Fig. 4-4 At the Races in the Countryside,1869, oil on canvas, cm 36.5 x 55.9, 1931 Purchase Fund, 26.790, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Fig. 4-5 Dead Fox in a Wood, 1867, oil on canvas, cm 92 x 73, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen. © RMN-Grand Palais /Michèle Bellot Fig. 4-6 Beside the Sea, 1869, pastel cm 23.81 x 31.43, gift of Bruce and ruth Dayton, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 96: 86. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Arts Fig. 4-7 Combing the Hair, 1869, essence on paper mounted on canvas, cm 47 x 82,6, The National Gallery, London Fig. 5-1 Portrait of Pauline de Metternich, 1865-66, oil on canvas, cm 41 x 29, The National Gallery, London Fig. 5-2 Portrait of a Man, 1867, oil on canvas, cm 85 x 65, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York Fig. 5-3 Suzanne and Edouard Manet, 1867-68, oil on canvas, cm 65 x 71, Kytakiushu Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan/Bridgeman Images Fig. 5-4 Portrait of Mme Gobillard, 1869, oil on canvas, cm 55.2 x 65.1, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequests of Mrs H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100.45), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Fig. 5-5 Victoria Dubourg, c. 1868-9, oil on canvas, cm 81.3 x 64.8, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, Gift of Mr and Mrs William E. Levis, 1963.45 Fig. 5-6 Mlle Dihau at the piano, 1869, oil on canvas, cm 45 x 32.5, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais/Hervé Lewandowski Fig. 5-7 Portrait of Léon Bonnat, 1863, oil on canvas, cm 43 x 36, Musée Bonnat, Bayonne. © RMN-Grand Palais /René-Gabriel Ojéda

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List of Illustrations

Fig. 5-8 Portrait of James Tissot, 1867-8, oil on canvas, cm 151.4 x 111.8, Rogers Fund, 1939 (39.161), photographed by Malcolm Varon, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Fig. 5-9 Self-Portrait with Evariste de Valernes, 1865, oil on canvas, cm 116 x 89, Musée d’Orsay.© RMN-Grand Palais/Hervé Lewandowski Fig. 5-10 Place de la Concorde. Vicomte Lepic and his Daughters, 1875, oil on canvas, cm 78.4 x 117.5, The State Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia/Bridgeman Images Fig. 6-1 Portraits in an Office, New Orleans, 1873, oil on canvas, cm 73 x 92, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau, France. © RMN-Grand Palais /Michèle Bellot/Madeleine Coursaget Fig. 6-2 Henri Fantin-Latour, Un Atelier aux Batignolles, 1870, oil on canvas, cm 171 x 205, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski Fig. 6-3 Le Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, 1875-76, oil on canvas, cm 92 x 68, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais/Hervé Lewandowski Fig. 7-1 The Orchestra of the Opera, 1869-70, oil on canvas, cm 56.5 x 46.2, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski Fig. 7-2 Musicians in the Orchestra, 1872, oil on canvas, cm 69 x 49, Städtische Galerie, Städel Museum, Frankfurt a. M. © U. EdelmannStädel Museum-ARTOTHEK Fig. 7-3 Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet of ‘La Source’, 1867, oil on canvas, cm 130 x 145, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York Fig. 7-4 The Dance Class, 1871, oil on wood, cm 19.7 x 27, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequests of Mrs H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100.184), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Fig. 7-5 The Dance Class, 1873-76, oil on canvas, cm 85.5 x 75, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. ©RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski Fig. 7-6 Ballet Rehearsal on Stage, 1874, oil on canvas, cm 65 x 81, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. ©RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski Fig. 9-1 Jeantaud, Linet at Lainé, March 1871, oil on canvas, cm 38 x 46, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski Fig. 9-2 Portrait of Mlle Hortense Valpinçon, c. 1871, oil on mattress ticking, cm 75.57 x 113.67 (canvas), The John R. Vanderlip und 48.1, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

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Fig. 9-3 Mme Jeantaud at the Mirror, 1875, oil on canvas, cm 70 x 84, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski Fig. 9-4 Lepic and Desboutin, 1876, oil on canvas, cm 72 x 81, Musée d' Orsay, Paris. ©RMN-Grand Palais/ Patrice Schmidt Fig. 9-5 Edgar Degas and Ludovic Lepic, The Ballet Master, 1874, monotype heightened with white chalk, The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Fig. 9-6 La Fête de la Patronne, 187, pastel over monotype, Musée Picasso, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais/René-Gabriel Ojéda Fig. 10-1 Six Friends at Dieppe 1885, pastel on wove paper laid down oncanvas,͒cm 114.9 x 71.1, Museum Appropriation Fund 31.320, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence Fig. 10-2 Le Tub, 1886, pastel on card, cm 60 x 83, © Musée d'Orsay. ©RMN-Grand Palais/ Patrice Schmidt Fig. 10-3 Self-Portrait with Zoë Closier, 1900, photograph, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF), Paris. (©) BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/image BnF Fig. 10-4 Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Self-Portrait with Saskia, 1636, etching, plate: 10.5 x 9.4 cm, sheet: 12.7 x 10.4; Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book began as a dissertation directed by Dr Anthony White, at the University of Melbourne. I am forever indebted to Anthony for his enlightened guidance in my studies. I am grateful to Prof Ann Galbally, associate supervisor, for all I have gained from her invaluable comments. I thank the staff at the Musée d’Orsay, and particularly Annabelle Mathias, Anne Roquebert, and Isabelle Gaëtan. Thanks are due to the following institutions: the Fondation Custodia, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Musée du Louvre, the Archives du Louvre, the Musée Gustave Moreau, the Musée Rodin, the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the Archives de Paris, the Archives Nationales; the Hermitage State Museum in St Petersburg, the new York Public Library, and the National Gallery of London. I wish to thank Prof Richard Thomson for his generous advice, and Prof Theodore Reff, whom I have consulted with questions concerning archival sources. I wish to thank warmly Elizabeth and Philippe Reyre, Françoise Halévy, Claude JoxeNabokov in Paris, and Mario Bozzi in Naples. I am especially grateful to Rod Donnelly, the most careful of editors. Thanks to Federation University Australia for a grant to fund research for this book, and to the staff at Cambridge Scholars Publishing. I thank here all my friends and my family, and especially Alex, Saskia, and Christiane, for their support. I am solely responsible for the shortcomings.

INTRODUCTION

“Je voudrais être illustre et inconnu…” : the Myth of the Artist Edgar Degas said “Je voudrais être illustre et inconnu…” and indeed Degas is a famous artist, while remaining, if not unknown, then, certainly misunderstood.1 We should know everything about Degas because of Henri Loyrette’s meticulous biography (1991), a crucial, monumental work that assembles all the extant documents on the life of Degas. But not enough light has been thrown on the artist to connect Degas properly to the time and place in which he lived.2 In the existing research on the artist, the artworks and personal history of Degas still fail to mesh with the social and cultural history of his times. For years Degas has been characterised as a wealthy aristocrat who was a blind follower of Ingres.3 Although this has been refuted by Degas scholars, namely Theodore Reff and Loyrette, the image of Degas the aristocrat is generally still the preferred one, whether by feminist scholars who profit from inscribing Degas’s misogyny in a patriarchal vision of the world, or by independent but reverential scholars who see Degas as enigmatic, and consider his wit and snobbery as key features of his personality. Others regard Degas as beyond comprehension, thereby perpetuating a romantic and un-historic cult of the artist as genius. Degas remains, for some writers, a supreme, haughty artist remote from the time in which he lived, while for others he is the “odd man out,” as one writer has labeled him.4 One reason for this wrong-headed picture of Degas is that the artist and the man have often either disappeared behind the erudition of the authors, in whose works the documentary approach overrides any attempt at interpretation of the life and works of the artist, or have been obscured by feminist reconstructions, which stress the perceived misogyny of the artist at the expense of a more contextualised analysis. 5 This study, which is motivated by dissatisfaction with the failure to evaluate the life and art of Degas together as a historical phenomenon, aims to bring the individual Degas back into focus, in order to demonstrate that he was neither an aristocrat nor the odd man out, but a bohemian living a socially mobile existence in nineteenth-century Paris, and whose

Introduction

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life and works are bound together in the artist’s self-fashioning enterprise and conquest of urban space. The inadequacy of much present research on Degas is largely due to the perpetuation of a mythical narrative constructed by such critics of the turn of the century as Gustave Geffroy, Camille Mauclair, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and by early biographers, such as Paul-André Lemoisne and Marcel Guérin. This mythical narrative has been left essentially unchanged by later biographers. This situation is an instance of what American art historian Catherine Soussloff has defined in The Absolute Artist. The Historiography of a Concept as “the naturalization of the cultural construction” or “mythic cultural figure”: “the artist.” For Soussloff, the mythologising of the artist has had consequences for the practice of the discipline of art history ever since its beginnings with Giorgio Vasari because “disciplinary taboos follow upon the heels of mythic cultural figures and, like other social taboos, result in suppression and repression.” As Soussloff writes: The naturalization of the cultural construction “artist” has produced two interrelated results for the interpretation of art history. First, there has been a lack of scrutiny of “naturalized” source materials, that is the biographies of the artist; and second, the character types that are represented in and result from this literature have been naturalized in interpretation.6

An example of the “suppression and repression” in accounts of the life of Degas will be given below. This study presents a biography of the artist that takes into account the existing primary sources of information on Degas and his family, also reviewed below in this introduction. An example will be given here of my mapping Degas according to a biographic and geographic methodology. What the mythical narrative constructed around Degas’s life has failed to acknowledge is that, unlike the grand bourgeois Edouard Manet, whose mother could afford to pay for his one-man exhibition in 1867, Degas was almost poor. This fact is important within this reconsideration of Degas, who is described in this study as a bohemian. While Manet wanted and could afford to fight alone his heroic struggle for success, promoting himself as a solitary genius, or “temperament,” as Emile Zola called it, it is often forgotten that almost all his life Degas worked within the Parisian rebellious culture of solidarity among artists: not only during the 1860s, when he had to portray friends for free, but at least in the years until 1886, when Degas was one of the chief organisers of the independent exhibitions held since 1874 by the Impressionists on the boulevard des Italiens.7 While in the literature Manet and Degas are often singled out as high bourgeois, close in class belonging

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and urbanity, it is evident that they were two very different kinds of bourgeois. This rewriting of the artist’s biography and oeuvre as a whole consists in a biographic and geographic approach that locates and considers the artist in the social locations and geographical places where he lived his life. At the heart of the argument presented here is how Degas distinguished himself in Parisian society as an artist. He did this by artistic selffashioning through the appropriation and conquest of a “space” of his own. The first concept, self-fashioning, is adopted from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (1980), a study of six English writers of the Renaissance, including Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. Greenblatt’s idea is that “in sixteenthcentury England there were both selves and a sense that they could be fashioned.” In Greenblatt’s definition, the self is “a sense of personal order, a characteristic mode of address to the world, a structure of bounded desires,” while the fashioning amalgamates “some elements of deliberate shaping in the formation and expression of identity.”8 Just as in Renaissance England there were “selves” and “a sense that they could be fashioned” so in the Paris art world of the second half of the nineteenth century, self-fashioning was the latest artist’s self-advertising strategy.9 Another common factor between the writers discussed by Greenblatt and many French artists, including Degas, working in Paris in the nineteenth century, is their social and economic mobility: their bohemianism, as Jerrold Seigel defined it.10 If Greenblatt’s self-fashioned Renaissance writers were “talented middle-class men” who had “moved out of a narrowly circumscribed social sphere and into a realm that brought them in close contact with the powerful and the great,” Degas too lived a mobile existence, as sociologically, geographically, and ideologically “displaced” as that of Greenblatt’s writers.11 Proof of Degas’s socioeconomic mobility is the fact that many writers have called him an aristocrat; others have described him as a grand bourgeois;12 and yet others have seen him as part of the “industrious and cultivated” bourgeoisie.13 It was precisely Degas’s bohemianism and self-fashioning that allowed such diversity in the evaluations of Degas. The rationale for Degas’s selffashioning is the grounds for one further analogy between nineteenthcentury Paris and the Renaissance. As Greenblatt explains, “There are periods in which the relation between intellectuals and power is redefined, in which the old forms have decayed and new forms have yet to be developed.”14 The Parisian art system at the time of Degas, centred on the Salon inherited from the monarchy, was just such an old form in decay, an institution with which the rising number of French artists working in Paris

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was deeply dissatisfied. The system could no longer provide them with the space each of them required in order to gain visibility and reputation. The pursuit of space, physically and metaphorically, was the problem, then, and this is the second concept used in this study, that of space. This means at once a physical space of exhibition, and also, metaphorically, a reputation, an audience, a style and themes recognisable as an artist’s own. As Richard Shiff has written in his study of Paul Cézanne, the Impressionists “were born into a culture that defined artistic production in terms of creating the original”: their attempt to find their own mythical artistic originality and creativity was a real “productive play of finding and making.” In this pursuit, they “acted self-consciously,” exercising control over their painting, while unable to exercise control over the critical response that it elicited, and its historical durability.15 Space must be understood therefore as closely related to artistic identity, an identity that is woven in a space and in a social network. This identity was the career goal that gave sense to, defined and informed Degas’s life as an artist, his search for a style, themes, and exhibition spaces through effective spatial strategies and personal itineraries that, in defiance of the established rules such as those of the obsolete Salon or the hierarchy of genres, allowed the survival and affirmation of emerging artists in the highly competitive Parisian artistic world. These spatial strategies and itineraries are those the individual devises to resist control and regimentation imposed from above, as theorised in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du quotidien (1980), translated in English as The Practice of Everyday Life. As has been written, this book belongs to the post-war French tradition of theories of everydayness or everyday life, established in the critical thought of such historians and thinkers as Fernand Braudel and Henri Lefebvre and put into practice by the militants of Guy Debord’s Situationist International with the aim to “redress the top-down bias of Foucault’s critique of the microtechnologies of power.”16 As Certeau writes in the introduction to The Practice of Everyday Life, “Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.” He asks, what do users do with the rituals, representations, and rules imposed on them and which cannot but be accepted? Certeau is concerned with the “difference or similarity between the production of the image and the secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization,” that is, what he calls operations or “ways of operating” that “constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of socio-cultural production.” The creativity of groups or individuals already caught in a system can take non-discursive, clandestine forms: “procedures and ruses

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of consumers compose the network of an anti-discipline.”17 Among the practices of everyday life by means of which users escape the rules imposed on them by the hegemonic system, Certeau has concentrated above all on the uses of space, on the ways of frequenting or dwelling in a place, on the complex processes of the art of cooking, and on the many ways of establishing a kind of reliability within the situations imposed on an individual, that is, of making it possible to live in them by reintroducing into them the plural mobility of goals and desires-an art of manipulating and enjoying.18

In Certeau’s theory, the practice of everyday life, which is central to this study of Degas, is the “spatial story” or personal itinerary that individuals produce by moving through urban space. These spatial practices, infused as they are with subjective meanings, “secretly structure the determining conditions of social life,” Certeau writes.19 Certeau’s spatial story is a concept similar to another concept also taken into consideration in my approach to Degas: Richard Rodger’s “mental map.” According to Rodger, individuals create their own personal maps of the cities in which they live by including landmarks, routes, and monuments that have personal significance for them and by excluding those aspects of the urban landscape to which they cannot ascribe a meaning.20 It is this concept, along with the perspective provided by Certeau’s theory, that is adopted in my approach to Degas, by mapping him, or pinpointing his self-fashioning enterprise through his conquest of spaces and places. This study considers different instances of Degas’s spatial story of self-fashioning through space. In Chapter Two, for example, the years Degas spent in Italy are recalled as a spatial strategy of self-teaching and appropriation of a space/body of knowledge (Italian art) against which Degas would soon define himself by choosing to self-fashion as a Northern neo-baroque painter and emulous of Anthony van Dyck. Places and spaces are real as well as symbolic in Degas: they articulate social and political meanings that Degas used as tools of self-fashioning. In Chapter Four, for instance, the Norman artworks produced by Degas in the 1860s (race-course scenes, seascapes, beach scenes) are seen as the products of the Parisian Anglophile perception of Anglo-Norman cultural heritage. Degas expressed through Normandy, a space at once symbolic and real, his avant-garde endorsement of an artistic and political “Northern-ness” that assimilated broadly French, English, Flemish, and Dutch art, and stood for republicanism and progressive values in an individualistic and nationalistic approach to culture that during the Second Empire was oppositional in nature.21

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In chapters Five and Six is found another instance of how space and self-fashioning cross in Degas: this is in the self-advertising strategy of offering to execute portraits of acquaintances, and especially of musicians and fellow painters in their own environment, that Degas practised in the 1860s and early 1870s. Space produces self-fashioning: along the urban itineraries forming the web of his own social life, Degas’s voluntary portraiture created a gallery of sitters upon whom the painter must rely for recognition. For an artist like Degas, determined to follow his artistic vocation, such spatial stories were a serious matter of self-fashioning, or self-image, because, as Pierre Bourdieu put it, “Few people depend as much as artists and intellectuals do for their self-image upon the image others, and particularly other writers and artists, have of them,” since “the quality of a writer, artist, or scientist, which is so difficult to define,” exists only “in, and through, co-optation, understood as the circular relations of reciprocal recognition among peers.”22 It was only through the Parisian artistic culture of understanding and mutual support that an artist deprived of means could hope to survive and eventually succeed in the second half of the nineteenth century in Paris. To return to the quotation at the beginning of this Introduction, Degas is only as illustrious and unknown as he wanted to be and as we let him be. The documentary evidence for some periods of his youth and adult age is scarce, while we know everything about his maturity and old age. Historians tend to use the evidence from more illuminated areas of his life to shed light on the darker ones. The first conclusion one should draw from this consideration is that Degas was for most of his life an unknown, undistinguished, struggling artist in a city replete with artists. Enough sources and knowledge are available to scholars to cease perpetuating the idea of Degas the aristocrat or haughty grand bourgeois and snobbish “odd man out.” Degas was unknown, simply because his family was not as relevant or wealthy as Manet’s, for instance. This study proposes a more historical and less mythological view of the life and artworks of Degas, arguing that Degas was a modern bohemian artist hard at work in Paris, where, in their everyday lives, the more unknown and socially mobile artists had more space at their disposal for strategy in the big city, a situation that allowed for vast manoeuvres in the competitive enterprise of self-fashioning and conquest of a place in the art world. Degas was not the classicist painter and narrow-minded bourgeois he is so often made out to be, but a struggling Parisian artist self-fashioning as a Northern neo-baroque painter of small portraits and genre scenes, and who lived a floating existence most of his life in the Paris of the second half of the nineteenth century. That continued until he

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became old, known, and revered by fellow painters, followers, and art collectors in the capital of the arts at its most mythical age, the Belle Époque.

Primary sources and modern interpretations What we know of Degas comes from such primary sources as the notebooks and letters of the painter, the Degas family archives, and the accounts of those who knew him personally. Since 1917, the year of his death, friends and acquaintances have left first-hand accounts, monographs, and biographies regarding Degas: Edmond de Goncourt, Paul Valéry, Daniel Halévy, Alice Michel, Walter Sickert, Ambroise Vollard, Marcel Guérin, Paul-André Lemoisne, Paul Lafond, just to mention a few, have left the fundamental texts for the Degas scholar. To this corpus we must add the most relevant scholarly interpretations regarding the artist, sociological readings of the art of Degas (Herbert, Lipton, Armstrong) and such theoretical approaches as feminist (Callen, Pollock, Nochlin) and Marxist art history (Clark).

Primary sources The first group of primary material examined here includes sources such as the notebooks, sketchbooks and letters of the artist. Degas kept notebooks from around 1853 until 1886, filled sketchbooks with drawings, and wrote numerous letters, some of which have survived and have been published by Marcel Guérin. These documents are a precious resource, because they record, almost uninterruptedly, the artist’s readings, addresses, contacts, observations, journeys, thoughts, expenses, and details relating to his projects or work in progress. In 1920, René Degas, the younger brother of the artist, donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France the notebooks found at the death of Degas in his studio. In April 1921, Paul-André Lemoisne, a librarian at the Cabinet des Estampes, published an article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts about “Ces albums, simple cahiers d’étudiant ou carnets de poche dans lesquels il notait ses impressions à l’aide de croquis ou de quelques phrases brèves.” As Lemoisne noted, the notebooks are not systematically dated, and one should not expect an ordered diary but a “simple instrument de travail” to which Degas confided whatever he thought important at any given moment, and where, among “croquis de paysages ou de types entrevus, souvenirs de chefs-d’œuvres admirés au passage, notes de voyage, recettes ou procédés etc., trouvons-nous pêle-mêle des renseignements.” But then,

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for Lemoisne, who had the cult of Degas, every scrap of information on Degas participated in the artist’s genius and deserved attention: “de la part d’un artiste comme Degas rien ne saurait nous être indifférent.”23 These notebooks and sketchbooks are, as Reff wrote in the introduction to his 1976 catalogue of them, “objects of a purely practical and private significance, intimately related to his interests and activities of the moment.”24 They contain nothing revelatory about Degas or his art and their extraordinary importance consists in their being records of Degas’s daily life. The same is true of the letters of Degas, of which the earliest date from 1871 and the latest from 1910. They are addressed to friends, colleagues, and art dealers and reveal his fondness of friends and family, and his support of fellow painters. They also reveal his tastes in matters of art, his role in the organisation of the independent exhibitions of the Société Anonyme, his continuous requests for money from his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in particular, his bouts of depression in old age, and his cursing of the artistic vocation. Marcel Guérin published some of Degas’s correspondence in 1947. Parts of the Degas family correspondence are conserved in Naples, in Paris, and in the USA. These sources are essential to our knowledge of the Degas family, their cosmopolitan background, and other details that contribute to a thorough and objective reconstruction of Degas’s life. It is the correspondence exchanged in 1860-61 between Degas and his aunt Laure Bellelli in Italy, for instance, that tells us that early enough Degas was well aware of the deeply troubled financial situation of his father, and this makes it impossible for Degas to sustain the status of a grand bourgeois. Through the correspondence between Degas and his father Auguste, of which only the latter’s letters remain, we are able to reconstruct Degas’s Italian tour not as an itinerary in pursuit of the Primitives, the Florentine masters of pure drawing, as so many writers claim, and as his father would have wished, but as Degas’s own selflearning itinerary in search of the Venetian colourists and Van Dyck’s Genoese portraits. From these letters we also learn that the Degas family read the Magasin Pittoresque, a popular illustrated magazine with articles on art, architecture, and other topics of general interest. Indeed, if the Degas family took much of what they knew from the Magasin Pittoresque, as it appears, it is time to revise the claims that they were, undoubtedly, a culturally sophisticated family: in fact, they pursued the same general interests common to many other bourgeois families in modern Paris. Within the group of primary sources we also find the accounts of Ellen Andrée and Alice Michel, two models who worked for Degas, as well as those of journalists, poets, artists, and friends of Degas who wrote within

9

Mapping Degas

living memory of the artist. Among them one finds Daniel Halévy, Paul Valéry, Edmond de Goncourt, Jacques-Emile Blanche, Ernest Rouart, Manet, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Berthe Morisot, Auguste Renoir, Odilon Redon, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, Lemoisne, Georges Jeanniot, Guérin, and the art dealers Ambroise Vollard and René Gimpel. These first-hand accounts describe Degas’s personality and record his sayings, his judgments, and opinions. Most of these writings began to appear after the painter’s death in September 1917, while others date from the lifetime of the painter, for example Goncourt’s journal entry on Degas of February 1874, the letters of Valéry, and those of Gauguin to their friends, or the letters of Van Gogh to his brother Theo and others. These first-hand accounts often evoke a difficult persona, but they all clearly affirm a dual image of Degas. One is the image of the artist as a harsh, bitter, and solitary man who refused to let unexpected journalists in his studio. The other is the image of a man loyal to his friends, a witty guest at their dinners and country houses, and an artist always ready to acknowledge and praise the talent of struggling or emerging artists (Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec). Degas had his tastes, preferences, and idiosyncrasies, a long list of which was given by Vollard, who, however, also pointed out that these “didn’t fool anyone.”25 They only strengthened his “reputation of being an eccentric and a tyrant in the opinion of certain people,” those people who found it natural to impose on an old man the obligation of visiting exhibitions, eating dishes with flourbased sauces, and sitting at tables full of flowers, just because such is done in the grand monde. It is important to remark that Vollard described Degas as a man with strong opinions, but also reminded the reader that the Degas he was evoking was an old man, in a frail state of being, physical and intellectual, upon whom some fashionable circles put unreasonable social expectations. Indeed, most of the memories we have of Degas were passed on by people acquainted with him during his old age, when he was not a very lively presence.26 Daniel Halévy hinted at a different reality behind the popular myth of Degas as a tyrant.27 In his introduction to the volume of letters by Degas, edited and published in 1947 by Guérin, Halévy warned that A certain picture of Degas exists, almost legendary, mythical; it is the artist as a recluse, voluntarily leading a churlish life, warding off with his rapid and trenchant replies the indiscretions of the world and of people, even contact with them.28

For Halévy, this was the picture of Degas known to those who “did not know him at all,” “a mask” applied to hide the very different and secret

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life of a man with many friends.29 It is worth noting that Halévy wrote this even though the decades of friendship between his family and Degas were sadly ended by the artist’s anti-Dreyfusardism. Another proof of the awareness of the existence of a double image of the painter can be found in Gauguin’s correspondence. Gauguin took part in the fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880, and around that time met Degas. They appreciated each other’s work. Degas had humane qualities in Gauguin’s eyes, as he wrote to his friend Georges Daniel de Monfreid from Tahiti in August 1898: I am very happy you have gotten to know Degas, and that while trying to help me you were able to make a connection that may be useful to you. Ah, yes! Degas has the name of being harsh and bitter. (I, too, says Z---). But it is not so for those whom Degas holds worthy of his attention and esteem. He has a fine heart and is intelligent. I am not surprised that he finds you talented and congenial. (…) Degas, both as to conduct as to talent, is a rare example of all that an artist should be; though he has had as admirers all who are in powerBonnat, Puvis and Antonin Proust-he has never asked for anything. From him one has never seen nor heard of a mean action, an indelicacy, or anything ugly. Art and dignity!30

And in the following letter to André Fontainas of March 1899, written from Tahiti, Gauguin was proud of the high opinion Degas had of him and of his art: At my exhibition at Durand-Ruel’s a young man asked Degas to explain my pictures, as he did not understand them. Degas smiled and told him one of La Fontaine’s fables- “Don’t you see”, he said,-“Gauguin is the lean wolf without a collar.”31

By defining him as a “lean wolf without a collar” Degas openly acknowledged and praised Gauguin’s originality and freedom, his being an artist without master. This episode speaks in favour of Degas’s openminded views and of his anarchism, too, and not of a narrow bourgeois or aristocratic mentality. Vollard, Gauguin, and Halévy all affirmed that there was a hidden Degas (not a truer Degas), known to friends and to those who did business with him, like Vollard, or enjoyed his company in the evenings after a day of work. The other Degas, no less real, was the Degas perceived by those who had to deal with him publicly and superficially, journalists for instance, whom he ill-treated or sent away. What transpires here is not just Degas’s self-fashioning, but his disenchantment with the ideology and corrupted politics, press and internal affairs of the Third Republic. An instance of this distrust of the public and official spheres is

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Mapping Degas

Degas’s abandonment of his project of a personal private museum. When in 1903 Degas visited the newly opened Musée Gustave Moreau, he found it bombastic and intoxicatingly self-appreciative. According to Valéry, he said: “C’est vraiment sinistre, on se croirait dans un hypogée…Toutes ces toiles réunîtes me font l’effet d’un Thesaurus, d’un Gradus ad Parnassum.”32 Other artists and visitors criticised the arrangement and the quality of the artworks in the Musée Moreau.33 In fact, unlike what other writers imply, Degas’s bad impression of the Musée Moreau had nothing to do with a supposedly mean opinion of Degas about Moreau the man or the artist. Degas, like many others, disliked the way in which the authorities had rearranged the place in deliberate disregard of the artist’s will. The possibility of such ill-treatment of the identity and individuality of the artist on the part of the State seemed to him so bad that it made him change his mind about the project for his maison d’artiste.34 The aged Degas’s attitude of political disillusionment was largely shared among artists and intellectuals in the fin-de-siècle anarchist culture of the magazines and cabarets artistiques of Montmartre. His choleric dislike of officialdom as seen in his ill-treatment of journalists and refusal to exhibit artworks at the Paris Universal Exhibitions, his traditionalist attitudes, his anti-Dreyfusardism and anti-Protestantism, all characterise him as an anarchist, like Pissarro, Mallarmé, Seurat and others. Degas’s intolerance of journalists, technocrats, and intellectuals, his hate of ideological modernity and his attachment to “mon rocher de Pigalle,” which he also called “my dunghill,” are marks of anarchism.35 Parisian anarchist ideals are instanced also in the engagement of Degas in what Alexander Varias calls “mutuality” and “communal associations” and certainly in his “tendency toward intimate association,” all of which were “the revolutionary tools enabling the Parisian people to rebel during the French revolution, the 1848 revolution, and the Commune.” More importantly, a certain Parisian-ness of Degas at work in his embrace of the feminine, and in his experimentalism, can be seen as reflecting the anarchist’s “mystique of the refined craftsmanship of the artisan.”36 Degas’s works and behaviour of the 1880s, 1890s and later, materialise the mores and atmosphere of the anarchist enclave of Montmartre, an instance of Parisian-ness that was “seditious in more than just a political sense,” and the attitudes of Bohemians and avant-garde artists who favoured “non-political channels” and “eccentric individual ways” to shock the bourgeois.37 Finally, the reputation of Degas as an anti-Semite should be tackled and considered historically together with his anti-Protestantism. Degas’s anti-Semitism cannot be dismissed on grounds that he was merely a child of his times. Considered superficially, as aspects of his traditionalism and

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patriotism, Degas’s anti-Semitism and anti-Protestantism only add to the figure of the artist as “odd man out” or aristocrat, real or metaphorical. While he was not racist, Degas’s anti-Semitism is not just an irritating symptom of prejudice and chauvinism. It should also be seen as instructive of his being bourgeois and non-bourgeois, an inexcusable symptom of the life-long struggle for money and radicalism of his uncertain social position. As Stephen Wilson has argued, French anti-Semitism and antiProtestantism of the 1880s and 1890s were distinctively economic in emphasis.38 Both Degas and his art dealer Durand-Ruel voiced their antiSemitism, but it is worth considering how they were both affected by the crash of the Union Générale Bank in 1882, which, according to Wilson, “deserves something of the status of a founding event” for those phenomena, spreading anti-Semitism as an association “of the Jews with the mysteries of high finance.” The event was “widely interpreted in the press as the result of deliberate action against the Catholic finance house by its Jewish rivals, led by Rothschild” and “directly affected many small savers and indirectly worried many more.”39 For the fifty-two-year-old Degas the crash of the Union Générale, which crippled financially his art dealer Durand-Ruel, led to more years of struggle for money. Equally strong was Degas’s anti-Protestantism. This has received little attention, but it is crucial to note that Degas perceived Protestants too as a threat to his rather simple ideas of French identity. Like Jews and Freethinkers, Protestants were the targets of political rhetoric, widely spread both from the Left and the Right, that lumped them as a foreign menace to French identity and body politic.40 To return to Degas’s reputation, at some point the choleric image of the rather petty bourgeois Degas was taken out of this complex socio-political context and the image of an aristocratic Degas began to prevail in arthistorical accounts. Why has this idea been uncritically accepted? The simple explanation is that the notion fitted well with his apparently difficult art, which was read as technically complex, “masterly,” instead of being read for what it in fact is: experimental art, art often technically unclear in its aims. The complex image of Degas has been used by a few critics and art historians to justify his art, which they saw as difficult, though they recognised his genius. The tendency to regard Degas as an original turned into the notion of the inaccessibility and elusiveness of the artist and his art. The difficulty encountered in attempts to find a meaning in Degas’s obsessive images became a complacent accusation of the illogical and irascible behaviour of the man, a statement about the unattainable status and genius of the artist.

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Mapping Degas

Modern interpretations Taken as a whole, the secondary material is characterised by a divergence between the discourse suggested by Degas’s artworks and that suggested by his life, a consequence of the “lack of scrutiny” of the biography of the artist that Soussloff denounces as the effect of the naturalisation of the cultural construction “artist.” Some writers have created a narrative encompassing both the biographical facts and the artworks of Degas, but somehow the two notions do not illuminate each other, as if the artworks were mere facts in the life of Degas and yet nothing but objects with a life of their own, untainted by Degas’s ideas and in whose creation Degas found no satisfaction but the purely physical pleasure of art-making.41 In these accounts, critical concepts of scholarship such as self-fashioning, bohemianism, and modern forms of artistic sociability do not enter. Other writers overlook Degas as a human being and approach his works from the point of view of their experimentalism in matters of techniques and styles. The most detailed study of the artist’s complex surfaces and manner of handling his media is the catalogue of the exhibition Art in the Making: Degas, held at the National Gallery of London in 2004-5.The complicated effects and technical experiments in Degas’s art have always fascinated scholars because of the supposed difficulty in understanding precisely how he manipulated his materials. He engaged with numerous drawing and painting techniques and used wax modelling, and at times photography, as a support to better understand the movements of his figures. We learn from the catalogue that he was convinced of the necessity to draw and redraw the same subject and could not resist the temptation to retouch his works over the years. The art of Degas is seen as both masterly and experimental. While his technical experimentalism is clearly characterised by a certain unevenness, in criticism this very experimentalism has often been constructed in ways that round it up with meanings of mastery and fluency in difficulty and complexity.42 Degas was also an art collector, who could equally appreciate works of Ingres, Delacroix, Daumier, Manet and works of younger artists such as Seurat, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. Anthea Callen’s The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique and the Making of Modernity (2000) also emphasises the working materials and procedures of the avant-garde, and the often shocked response of contemporary critics. She identifies the new easiness of the technique with the idea of modernity found in the apparent easiness and rapidity of the painting processes, equated to the nonchalance of the flâneur.

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In the Marxist history of art, T. J. Clark has argued in The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (1985) that the avant-garde painters of the 1860s were expressing the sense of loss, the sense of dislocation, and the uncertainty of social life created by the demolitions and consequent reconstruction of Paris as a bourgeois city, as envisioned by Haussmann. The painters expressed their negative view of Haussmannian Paris through their adoption of the aesthetics of the unfixed and the unfinished in painting, technical choices which, in Clark’s view, reflected modernity as uncertainty and ambiguity. According to Clark the avant-garde artists did not simply accept the boulevards as charming, but looked at those who did find them charming. Manet’s Olympia, for Clark the founding monument of modern art, was the ideal image to represent the new society of spectacle, but its contemporary critics could not have seen this meaning: they saw only the indeterminacy of the painting, the unclean and rubber-like flesh of Olympia, or, in the case of Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère, its unreadability. Comparing the critical reception of Manet’s Olympia at the Salon of 1865 to that of Degas’s Femmes devant un café, shown in 1877 at the third Impressionist exhibition, Clark writes that critics were not as shocked with Degas as they had been with Olympia, because in their eyes the satirical note in Degas rendered his work more trivial. Clark has found in the art of Degas art an attempt to neutralise dangerous issues through satire, caricature, and physiognomy. In Clark’s view, for Degas, the modern city would produce “characters;” it would therefore be subject to “sharp, ironical notation and equally fine physiognomic encoding.” For Clark, the project did not work: Degas was defeated by “the resistance of modern life to physiognomic reading,” just as modernist painting failed in its attempt to “find a way to picture class adequately and devise an iconography of modern life.”43 Another important text within the sociological field is Robert Herbert’s Impressionism. Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (1988), which provides a general introduction to the study of Paris as the setting for Impressionist modernity, and of the figure of the artist/flâneur. For Herbert, the position of Impressionism as the foundation of modern art is allied to the significance in early modern culture of cafés, outdoor concerts, theatre, vaudevilles, dance, picnics, suburban outings, seashore vacations and so on. Herbert’s use of social history and biography as aids to interpretation is a fruitful methodology, but his conclusion about Degas is that he was “so much the lone wolf” that he deviated from the more typical type of flâneur, epitomised by Manet and his exquisite manners, savoir-faire, and dedication to shocking the bourgeoisie. According to Herbert, Degas “associated with the wealthy and privileged among whom he was born”

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Mapping Degas

but was “embittered by the decline of his family’s business enterprises,” and used art to reveal “the anxieties and the tensions of his contemporaries with surgical cruelty.”44 Within the secondary literature on Degas, feminist interpretation has been preeminent. Degas’s depictions of dancers, laundresses, milliners and bathers have been placed in the context of nineteenth-century patriarchal attitudes that rendered women as inferior beings devoid of any subjectivity, an object of the male gaze serving a merely erotic purpose. In this view, women in the nineteenth century, whether naked or dressed, had one main function: to represent their own condition of marginality under the eye of the all-powerful man. Degas’s painting is just another example of this patriarchal attitude of ownership and victimisation-consumption of women. Feminist art historians who have studied Degas in this light include Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, Norma Broude, and Callen. One feminist writer who has offered an original view of Degas is Eunice Lipton, in Looking into Degas. Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life of 1986. She has interpreted Degas’s realist paintings of racetracks and dance as the result of the painter’s choice “to paint social events of past grandeur,” the decaying leisure realms of horseracing and ballet, and to depict the intrinsic character of change, discontinuity, and alienation in modernity. Degas’s dancers, laundresses, and milliners at work and women at their bath, for Lipton do not necessarily show low morality and covert prostitution. In her interpretation, the painter formally adheres to the nineteenth-century classicising style, but in such a way as to convey a provocative social meaning of movement, struggle, and anxietyand not the conservative content of “morality, nationalism, and a nostalgia for an idealized past.” In this reading, Degas’s aim is one of subversion: women are not seen as frivolous and charming, but as ugly and immoral, and the male figures are not seen as authoritarian, but are caricatured and marginalised. In Lipton’s analysis, Degas’s work showed two sides: “what Degas and many of his contemporaries longed to hold onto, the past and privilege, and what they had no control over, the present and change.” Work is, for Lipton, the issue in these paintings, because they daringly depict not just workers, but working women, which “was to go straight to the heart of social agitation, exactly where ideologies about the working class and sexuality intersected.” From her observation that Degas dignified these workers, not unlike the way Balzac did, and from the consideration that either Degas had profound empathy for skilled work, being a craftsman himself, or that his own sexual inhibitions were the root of his “uncommonly and humanizing vision” of women at work, Lipton drew her conclusion that Degas was experiencing “his own ambiguous position in

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society” and “an inability to define oneself socially.”45 Lipton believes that Degas was torn between the rise of new social classes and the loss of power and authority of his whole social class. Lipton wrongly assumes, like most writers, that Degas belonged to the more powerful and authoritarian social strata, but her sense of Degas’s social instability and of his empathic attitude towards working women is right. Other writers who have analysed Degas’s artworks have found that their modernity, experimentalism, and avant-gardism are at odds with Degas the narrow-minded, racist bourgeois that he was. It is as if historians of Degas had agreed that the man and the painter, the life and the works were not a single story, which indeed they must be. In that group of writers, Armstrong finds that, among the modern masters, Degas is a phenomenon apart, as illustrated in the title of her book, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (1991). Faced with “the contradiction that arises in confrontation with Degas,” Armstrong locates the nature of such contradiction in the presence of “the following pair of terms: realism and repetition, or, otherwise described, storytelling and seriality,” or “history” and “modern life.” Armstrong’s view of Realism as documentary evidence cannot accommodate Degas’s realism, and to confront the difficulty she encounters, Armstrong uses various approaches (socioeconomics, semiotics, literary criticism, and psychology) depending on the explanation the images call for. No other approach or account would suit “Degas’s double project of traditionrecuperation and -disintegration” but this “oscillation between positivist and deconstructivist points of view.”46 But the nature of Degas’s realism was not documentary: he never painted real spaces, as Goncourt knew, only realistic ones. It was a Northern type of realism: the realism of the Dutch painters of the Golden Age, who painted nae’t leven (from memory) or uyt de gheest (from memory mixed with fantasy). Armstrong also intuits a pattern of group engagements on the part of the artist: with the Impressionists, with the members of his own family involved in commerce, with the circle of bankers/art patrons referred to in the Portraits at the Stock Exchange of 1878, and with the circle of Operagoers uniting around the librettists Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac. Armstrong does not see in Degas’s social circles the question of modern sociability and mutual support that modern painters had to engage with in order to be able to pursue an artistic career in a competitive environment like Paris. She sees in Degas’s sociability a confirmation of his supposed concerns for his assumedly privileged social status. For her, Degas is concerned with work and with workers’ relation to their work as well as with the issue of professionalism being nothing but a form of prostitution

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Mapping Degas

for which aestheticism is merely a cover.47 This, for Armstrong, corresponds to Degas’s personal search for his own position in the world, reflected in his ambivalent attitude, torn between his wish to be an artist above any form of commerce and his actual need to sell his works after the death of his father in 1874 and the collapse of the family wealth. But, as this study shows, the evidence is that Degas had always known that there was no family wealth to speak of and that the status of painter, in his case, would only come to him as a hard-earned position. In a case of unchecked biographical sources, the writer has accepted the mythological version of the wealthy Degas, who did not need to paint to survive, and was part of, and painted for, “Halévy’s society, composed of aristophile snobs, bouffesparisiens and opéra-comique initiates, and La Vie Parisienne writers.” For them, believes Armstrong, Degas painted, as in the case of the caféconcert pictures, the lowlife negative of their own high society, and a place for slumming, whose spectacle could be viewed with a fascinated disdain that confirmed its otherness and its viewers’ detachment from it, not to mention the observing class’s dependence on the performing class’s low society for contrast.48

Historian Philip Nord has analysed Degas and the other Impressionists in the light of their purely political ideas, proposing that what really united these painters was their political faith, republicanism. Until divergences became explicit at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, republicanism and new painting were one cause. When it comes to discussing Degas’s republicanism, Nord unfortunately presents another case of unsubstantiated biography, along the lines of what Soussloff has described. For Nord, Manet’s attachment to republicanism was sincere, Renoir’s was “opportunistic” and Degas’s was “transient.” But Nord cannot easily reconcile the old clichés gleaned from other writers about the wealth and high-bourgeois status of Degas with his own and correct perception of Degas as a “young man of prickly independence,” and “of tolerant and progressive views.” He concludes by stating that Degas was as much a republican as a patriot.49 The issue of Degas’s misanthropic persona has been such a preoccupation in scholarly literature that in 1996 Kendall set to redress the situation. This he did in his curatorial work for Degas: beyond Impressionism, at the National Gallery of London, an exhibition focusing on the last thirty years of Degas’s career.50 Kendall has shown that the reclusive and cantankerous behaviour of the painter are myths generated by Degas himself, directly and indirectly, through his rejection of people

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whom he did not wish to get involved with, journalists for example, or friends fallen out of favour, or anyone who, not knowing his habits, dared to disturb him while at work. For the rest, Kendall has written, Degas was a kind person to models and children, and as sociable as he had always been: keeping up his correspondence, attending dinners and exhibitions, meeting friends old and new, young poets and artists, taking pictures, travelling abroad for business or pleasure. He took direct and professional care of exhibitions and sales of his work. The book brings to light Degas’s self-awareness of his public and private sides. It is clear that Degas could manipulate these two spheres, thereby moulding his reputation for the future.51 Nevertheless, this portrait of Degas, in its attempt to demonstrate that the old Degas was not a misanthrope, but a good man, is another instance of “the situation of the textually ‘lost’ artist,” to borrow Soussloff’s expression.52 The aim of this study is to retrieve a lost artist, to write a more substantial and less mythological biography of Degas including a more accurate account of his works-hence the mapping, within a geographic approach. To find Degas, we must first locate his hiding spot, so to say. Therefore, an important premiss of my argument is Degas’s art-historical consciousness: Degas’s disguise, explicit, for instance, in his selffashioning in emulation of Anthony van Dyck or Gustave Courbet. Soussloff’s book The Absolute Artist. The Historiography of a Concept was essential to understanding that the genre of the artist’s biography, upon which the art-historical discipline is built, is anecdotal by definition.53 If art history has to be history, it must start with a historically valid and reliable biography of the artist, which locates (or “maps”) the artist in history, that is, in a precise space and time with its unique set of issues and motivations. Unless this is done, the artist is not there. Through a genealogical approach which takes “the concept of the artist to be central to the practice of an art history that has traditionally been driven by concerns with attribution and the delineation of individual and period styles,” Soussloff sets out to locate “the artist in the discourse of history” and attempts a new historiography for art history, “in order to bring the relevance of history, in all of its discourses, into alignment with a variety of theoretical methods that have been employed since 1978 to interpret texts.” As Soussloff argues, “the appearance in history writing of the concept of the artist should logically lead to historiographical writing (the writing about history) where the historian has traditionally been most aware of how cultural and philosophical concepts operate in texts, that is, discursively.” However, as Soussloff remarks, what motivated her study was precisely “the obvious lack of critical discussion about the concept of

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Mapping Degas

the artist in exactly the literature where one might expect to find it.”54 The artist, then, taken for granted and reduced to an absolute concept, mythical in essence, is not there. This happened to Degas, whose supposed aristocratic or grand-bourgeois status, bad character, Right-wing ideas, and classicising works have solidified in an image hard to challenge, a “state of pure being between the knower and the known,” a “realm of the absolute,” where the artist has a special relationship not only to art but also to the Absolute, unlike other humans. It would seem that this special relationship is exactly what invests the artist with an absolute cultural status of his own. The artist is not just unlike others but absolutely different because of the concept of art.

That image of Degas can be dismantled by asking, where is the artist? Where is Degas?

The mad Degas In what follows we will see that from as early as 1874 Degas has been perceived as a difficult, moody human being. This presentation of Degas as a being out of the ordinary, a neurotic, genial, modern artist, appeared during his lifetime. In the twentieth century, the perception of Degas’s persona changed radically into that of a venerable Olympian, a proud aristocrat. It is possible to pinpoint precisely the place in the literature where the image of the artist emerged in such a different light, by comparing two critical first-hand accounts of Degas, one by Edmond de Goncourt and the other one by Lemoisne. One of the earliest first-hand accounts we possess regarding Degas is found in the journal of Edmond de Goncourt. On February 13, 1874, Goncourt records that he has spent the previous day in the studio “of a bizarre painter, named Degas.” After many attempts in different directions (an allusion to the eclecticism of Degas’s production in the 1860s and early 1870s), continues Goncourt, Degas “has fallen in love with modernity,” electing as his themes dancers and laundresses. In the atelier, Degas not only shows Goncourt images of laundresses, but embarks on a performance, showing his own ability to speak the slang of the laundresses and accompanying this with a technical explanation of such professional gestures of the laundress as “le coup de fer appuyé, le coup de fer circulaire, etc.” Then Degas shows Goncourt the dance pictures, while performing choreographic mimicking, doing an arabesque, and going on tiptoes. Goncourt is amused: “Et c’est vraiment très amusant de le voir, sur

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le haut de ses pointes, les bras arrondis, mêler à l’esthétique du maître de danse l’esthétique du peintre, parlant du boueux tendre de Vélasquez et du silhouetteux de Mantegna.” Finally, what follows is one of the most fascinating images of Degas we have: un original garçon que ce Degas, un maladif, un névrosé, un ophtalmique, à ce point qu’il craint de perdre la vue; mais par cela même, un être éminemment sensitif et recevant le contrecoup du caractère des choses. C’est, jusqu’à présent, l’homme que j’ai vu le mieux attraper, dans la copie de la vie moderne, l’âme de cette vie.

Degas: an eccentric, sickly, neurotic artist, oversensitive to the character of things, and who fears for his sight. For Goncourt this delirious Degas is the painter of modern life. Nevertheless, the writer concludes his journal entry regarding Degas on a pessimistic tone, presuming that Degas would never produce “quelque chose de complet” because “C’est un esprit trop inquiet.” Furthermore, is it conceivable, wonders Goncourt, that Degas did not put his delicately felt studies of beings and characters against “le rigoureux décor du Foyer de la Danse de l’Opéra” but that he had a “perspecteur” draw for him “des architectures de Panini?”55 What we find in Goncourt’s perspective on Degas is the entire social history of the painter: Degas was an original, unstable, and neurotic painter of modern life, but les nerfs were far from being a condition exclusive to Degas. Debora Silverman has carefully studied Goncourt’s views concerning the relationship between nerves and modern art. As she has elucidated in Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France (1989), for Goncourt true artists had to be mad, psychotic, strange, that is, acutely subjective.56 By Goncourt’s words we must understand that Degas’s obsessive behaviour and painting, their identification, which Goncourt explicitly grasped, stood for Degas’s struggle to affirm himself as a modern, original, specialised artist. He was a Pygmalion driven by an obsession affecting his own life, a Realist, but of his own world, the painter of dancers and laundresses, the very opposite of the academic artist. As George Moore recorded, Degas himself shared this vision: in showing a visitor a drawing in his collection, hung in his apartment, Degas said, “Ah! Look at it, I bought it only a few days ago; it is a drawing of a female hand by Ingres; look at those fingernails, see how they are indicated. That’s my idea of genius, a man who finds a hand so lovely that he will shut himself up all his life, content to do nothing else but indicate finger-nails.”57 The other thing Goncourt knew about Degas was that, not only he did not paint the Foyer de la Danse of the Paris Opera as it really was, but that he had a draughtsman to help with the Panini-like architectural studies.58 Goncourt

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Mapping Degas

informs us that the mature Degas (he was nearly forty in February 1874, when Goncourt visited him) was an eccentric and an obsessive, that is, he was anything but stale or aristocratic in demeanour and reputation. He was an unknown artist of uncertain means, one of thousands trying to establish an identity in a metropolis overflowing with artists. In February 1874, his father had just died, and Degas was organising an exhibition of the Société Anonyme, a newly-founded society of independent artists, of which he was a member. Degas, genuinely driven by such private and urban obsessions as ballet dancers and laundresses, whom he painted, affected a neurotic, mad-like behaviour that led him to dance on tiptoes in order to prove his point. What we know from reading through Goncourt’s lines, then, is that Degas was a bohemian who took care to link private life and painting in a self-fashioning enterprise which was quintessentially urban, modern, and avant-garde. Goncourt’s 1874 journal entry on Degas is illuminating in another respect. Goncourt also tells us that Degas drew and painted interiors that were invented rather than actual. Degas’s attitude to space, which is still discussed today, was clear to his contemporaries: he painted semi-fictional spaces, spaces of his own. This notion of space created by the artist is also essential in my discussion of Degas as a modern, bohemian and oppositional character, both in his youth and in his old age and as a self-fashioned Northern neo-baroque painter of the nineteenth century. Degas created space in the style of the Dutch painters of the Golden Age, uyt de gheest or nae‘t leven, from memory or from memory mixed with imagination, that is, he created spaces of his own, which he mastered and in which he moved freely. In this reside the individualism, the freedom, and the Northern-ness of the painter’s attitude to space, which in turn define the avant-garde action par excellence, the artist’s conquest and appropriation of space. Goncourt’s journal entry on Degas hints at this, but why hasn’t it generated more attention in Degas studies? In fact, Goncourt’s journal entry on the frenzied, delirious Degas is known, but was obliterated, overwritten by one particular writer and by a subsequent generations of writers who established the myth of Degas as a classicist artist, an anti-Semitic and anti-Protestant snob. This was started by Paul-André Lemoisne of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, who met Degas in 1895 and published various articles on him as well as the first catalogue of Degas’s oeuvre (1946-49). This was accompanied by a biography in which we find stated for the first time that Degas was an aristocrat, of a wealthy family of bankers, a painter who did not need to sell or execute works on commission. Far from being true these ideas have been repeated since by writers to the present day.59 Lemoisne is an authority on Degas, whom he venerated as a classical French master in

Introduction

22

times of retour à l’ordre and after. In wanting to assert this Degas, Lemoisne had something to say about Goncourt’s 1874 view of a nervous Degas. He explicitly suggested editing Goncourt’s inexplicable, odd idea of a mad Degas: Supprimons le mot névrosé, qui ne s’explique guère pour qui n’a pas connu Degas, et nous avons une esquisse curieuse de l’artiste à cette époque.60

Rejecting those aspects of the artist and his style that were no longer understood as modern, Lemoisne tailored a life of Degas as patrician, an image with which scholars still reckon. Such a specialist scholar of Degas as Henri Loyrette explicitly stated in his 1991 biography that Degas was neither an aristocrat nor a grand bourgeois, but came of a petit bourgeois, if cultivated and cosmopolitan, family.61 But this is not the generally acknowledged view of Degas, a good example of which is found in Anne Higonnet’s biography of Berthe Morisot, published in 1990. Higonnet introduces Degas as “born into an aristocratic family,” a mean and sarcastic bachelor, almost as dapper as Manet, he lived alone, dedicated to an increasingly rigorous and innovative art. He was a terrible snob - both socially and intellectually - sometimes worse than a snob, almost a bigot.

As for “Degas’s possible misogyny,” for Higonnet he “certainly painted cruel pictures of women. Degraded prostitutes, grotesque society dames, brutish working girls-all of these are in Degas’s pictorial repertoire.” Because for Higonnet Degas’s pictures of the women in his family or of friends of his, like the Morisot sisters, “display sentiments more tender,” the scholar concludes that Degas’s disparaging treatment of women “was influenced by class, and within class boundaries by blood ties and by intellectual considerations. He did not gladly suffer fools of either sex.” As for his relationship with Manet, the two “complemented each other; where Manet charmed, Degas cowed, where Manet’s resilience lay in his unquenchably naïve optimism, Degas cynically disdained success.” For Higonnet, Manet “celebrated the fashionable bourgeois world to which he belonged” while the aristocratic Degas “dissected a bourgeois world he held in mesmerized contempt.” As a result, “If Manet brilliantly represented the surfaces of Paris, Degas revealed its darker underside. Each man and his art held a different kind of appeal.”62 Sketchy biographical narratives such as these, dryly signalling the link between the social standing of the Right-wing banking aristocrat and the art of the sadistic celibate, thrive on the strength of clichés that confer legitimacy to the writing of feminist art history at the cost of perpetuating misidentification. This kind of art

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Mapping Degas

history is not simply inaccurate, but borders on a caricature cut off from the reality of the life and personal circumstances of the artist.

A New Approach: Mapping Degas In its title, Mapping Degas. Real Spaces, Invented Spaces, Symbolic Spaces in the Life and Works of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) points to its geographic approach, and to the method of mapping as both a tool and a goal of geography. This geographic approach to Degas is often more symbolic than descriptive, as it is not confined to drawing a merely descriptive and graphic urban geography of Degas in Paris, as John Milner for instance did in his The Studios of Paris. In that book, he sketched synthetic maps of the successful art world of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, concentrating on locating with a black dot the ateliers of once famous academic artists. Milner’s mapping was overly literal, but nevertheless brought about a new idea: The relationship between Paris and its artists is visible in its geography, in whole streets devoted to studios, in the distinct areas they favoured, in its monuments, its collections and its art

and that “to examine that relationship is to evoke the place as much as the time.63 While Milner’s artistic geography of Paris and Varias’s study of Montmartrois anarchism at the turn of the century corroborate the conclusions of this study about a bohemian Degas, radical and anarchist, rather than a mere bourgeois, my approach is not graphically descriptive but symbolic: for example, in its uses of the concepts of Northern-ness, Dutch-ness, and Parisian-ness, this study looks at how Degas, and the other new painters, adopted these geographical concepts in their “will to be the culture’s voice-to create the abstract and brief chronicles of the time,” to borrow Greenblatt’s words.64 While Degas and other French artists of the avant-garde self-fashioned themselves as Northern painters, as free political subjects, it was a Parisian identity and reputation that they were all seeking.65 In this study, the word mapping is used not so much in the literal sense of marking and highlighting places on a map, but above all in the sense used by Hans van Miegroet and Neil De Marchi in Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe, 1450-1750 (2006). The authors use “mapping in the sense of pinpointing what happened, where and when, and adding detail that might explain why.”66 This mapping is adopted in this approach to Degas. This approach can be defined as geographic and biographic, and is appropriate to a search for Degas “the lost artist” and to a new reading of

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the art of Degas, because it takes into account the individual, the specific human factor in the specific environment of Paris. This was the city where his art took shape, at the conjunction of specific spatial and temporal circumstances, rather than the more general context of “modernity”. This account of Degas aims to explore the “concrete links between identity and place”, “the contingency of urban social relations” and even the ”situational” identities, that is, “the particular roles (…) performed in particular places” by the same individual, Degas, in an urban milieu.67 These definitions are borrowed from Thomas Boogaart’s An Ethnogeography of Late Medieval Bruges. In this book, Boogaart is particularly concerned with the nature and structure of corporatism in late medieval Bruges, but problems of methods in the field of urban history and urban sociology are also treated. Boogaart acknowledges the current relevance of multidisciplinary approaches within these fields, but, as he explains, the field has suffered from a neglect stemming from the perception “that the urban environment constituted merely a background against which history transpired or a setting against which social life took place.”68 Boogaart’s remarks can be used to describe the superficial treatment of urban history and urban sociology within the field of the history of art of nineteenth century, and Paris in particular. These all reveal a Marxistderived approach to the issue of the nineteenth-century city, especially visible in the standard account accusations about capitalism, Haussmann, and the society of spectacle. In such accounts, artists and their art are bent to serve these fixed perspectives, and, as a matter of fact, no space is left for the individual, its experience, and its social life, except for archival details. Boogaart proposes an alternative to this obscuring of the individual through a pretence to objectivity, an alternative which relies on Heidegger’s phenomenology, and consists in accepting the richness and also, at times, incomprehensibility of human experience, and in accepting the challenge posed to the scholar by a desire to achieve this knowledge. In our case, the general key terms: urban environment, individual experience, and social life, translate into specific terms: Paris, Degas, and his social networks and circles. This study explores the relation between Degas and the place of his work and life, and explores how this identity/spatial belonging shapes his art, what Boogaart has defined as “the power of place.” This is, in his words, a geographic approach that would not bifurcate the town’s material fabric from its social or economic structure. Such a prima facie distinction between “space” and “society” obscures precisely that in which I am interested: the “lived environment” that inheres inside all communities. The “lived environment” is not something autonomous from the built environment, the material girders

25

Mapping Degas that support our feet, the shelters spanning our heads, or the nooks and crannies in which we nestle our bodies. This is because humans are defined neither by their minds, nor by their bodies, but by how they work in conjunction. So too must our geographies strive to capture the genius loci, the spirit of the environment that encapsulates our experience. 69

Building on the phenomenology of Heidegger, Boogaart stresses the uniqueness of a human existence by considering both the given factors encoded in the lived environment, and the complexity of the individual self, whose “experience of the landscape derives not merely from their eyes, but from habit and memory, it is structured not only by ideas, but social roles and rituals, it is conditioned not only by conscious desires, but also shaped by previous impressions garnered from these places.”70 Boogaart defines this approach as ethnogeography.71 The geography of art is both a new field of study, and as old as historiography. Geographical aspects of art have long been treated by art historians, but in an implicit manner.72 Connoisseurship, one of the foundations of the history of art, is a classic example of geographic concern within the discipline, as it is based on the identification of paintings by “schools” of painting. A connoisseur in the process of attributing paintings would use terms like “Italian,” “Flemish,” “Dutch,” or “German school,” which refer to the geographical provenance of the paintings, their identity, in other words. In Degas’s years, to limit ourselves to this chronological ambit of interest, the geographical terminology was widely used in the history of art, and this study uses terms of geographical nature such as Northern-ness, Dutchness, and French-ness in the discussion of Degas’s self-fashioning and artistic identity. Geographical aspects of art have been debated in the German-speaking world since the beginning of the twentieth century, and as a field in itself, the Kunstgeographie. For our times, a definition and legitimate existence of a geohistory of art has appeared in 2004, with Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s Toward a Geography of Art. The book deals with the place of art, because “If art has a history, it has also at least implicitly had, and has, a geography; for if the history of art conceives of art as being made in a particular time, it also puts it in a place.” Kaufmann locates the philosophical root of the unity of geography and history in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who did not make the distinction between time and space absolute, and for whom, since history always presupposes geography, “geography was the ontological precedent; while since geography requires historical knowledge for explanatory purposes, it is epistemologically dependent on history.”73 So, to conclude with a consideration, being is place, identity is place. Through the interdisciplinary approach presented

Introduction

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above, which has evolved in response to the limitations of the existing literature on Degas, this study aims to restore the importance of identity and biography when dealing with an artist’s oeuvre. Chapter One introduces the reader to the Degas family background of cosmopolitan, self-made businessmen, who never made it to the ranks of the wealthy. The painter’s father, Auguste was more interested in art and music than business. The Nouvelle Athènes, where Degas was born and spent all his artistic life, presented the defining characteristics of RightBank Parisian-ness: the proximity of entertainment and luxury to financial and political institutions. Despite their reputation for being grand bourgeois, the evidence is that the Degas family were quite poor. A bohemian, self-fashioning Degas therefore emerges, far from the conventional, august image of the artist. The young artist also lived on the Left Bank, where, consistently with the geography of Paris, he attended such institutions as the Lycée Louis-le Grand, the Sorbonne as a student of law, and, briefly, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. On the Left Bank he also became acquainted, in the company of his father, with collectors (Dr La Caze, Grégoire Soutzo) and dealers (Marcille), at a time when the rue Saint-Jacques was still the centre of printmaking and art dealing. Degas’s relationship with the Left Bank, over the years, emerges as idiosyncratic, as he came to regard the medieval and nearly untouched Left-Bank and those of his friends who lived there (Fantin-Latour for instance) as being gloomily rive gauche. From Degas’s own psycho-geographic associations and from the mapping of his formative years, this chapter concludes that Degas was not at all a flâneur. Rather, Degas moved strategically, knowing where he was going (Louvre, Cabinet des Estampes) and for a specific purpose: to educate himself in front of the artworks. Despite his admiration for Ingres (whom he met in 1855), in the late 1850s Degas looked carefully at Gustave Courbet’s Realism. Chapter Two looks at the years spent by Degas in Italy, in 1856-59. It is shown that despite the efforts of his father to convince him of the indisputable superiority of the Italian Quattrocento, in Italy Degas felt drawn to the works of the Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck. This confirmed Degas’s responsiveness to Northern-European art, to which he and other future second-generation Realists had been introduced by Gustave Courbet in the 1850s. In Chapter Three, I offer a reading of Degas’s history paintings (in particular Scene of War in the Middle Ages) as the painter’s personal reflection on the irreconcilability of married life and artistic vocation, a major theme in the writings of the Naturalists. Chapter Four looks into the Norman themes (race-course scenes, seascapes, beach scenes) produced by Degas in the 1860s, works which

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Mapping Degas

signal both Parisian Anglophilia and avant-garde endorsement of a Northern-ness (standing for republicanism during the years of the Second Empire) which broadly assimilated French, English, and Dutch art. Following a self-advertising tactic devised and perfected by Courbet, in the 1860s Degas also executed numerous un-commissioned portraits of friends and acquaintances in their specific environment. Chapter Five examines Degas’s Iconography, that is, the way in which he rooted his working practice and his self-fashioning after Anthony van Dyck in his social and spatial world. Degas’s unique form of social realism and his geographic and strategic approach to navigating the city built up a personal itinerary in Paris and a gallery of artist sitters which, inspired as it was by Anthony Van Dyck’s Iconographia, can be called Degas’s Iconography. Chapter Six provides an account of how such city places as the Louvre galleries, the artists’ studios, dealers’ shops and cafés were appropriated as meeting places where Degas and other modern artists discussed issues and ideas of avant-garde art. The meeting of Manet and Degas is discussed in order to clarify that they had very different working practices and that their relationship was not one of dependence on Manet’s modernism on the part of Degas. The chapter then analyses Degas’s role in the organisation of the Impressionist exhibitions as avant-garde installations, spaces, that is, which the artists conquered, appropriated, and recreated. Chapter Seven examines Degas’s best-known subject matter, images of dancers engaged in the gestures of their profession, as they emerge from being a motif in the background of his portraits of musicians to become a theme which is far from being a vision or commentary of Parisian lowlife (as is argued by Marxist and feminist art historians). The ballerina is for Degas a symbol for the avant-garde artist, a notion that was not of his invention. It was a literary image that circulated in avant-garde circles and had originated with Balzac. Degas’s relationship with the spaces of the Opera is analysed as a territory of interaction between the social and the symbolic, the real and the artificial. The Opera was for Degas the Wagnerian space, the experience of art-making itself: the Opera being for the ballerina what the studio is for the committed avant-garde artist. Chapter Eight looks at Degas’s lifestyle concerns about health, food, and sex as closely connected dimensions of the hygiène de l’artiste. Chapter Nine discusses Degas’s engagement in the avant-garde and the evolution of his political ideas from the republicanism of the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune to his anarchic anti-Dreyfusardism at the end of the 1890s. Degas’s anarchistic behaviour is treated in more detail in Chapter Ten, where I also read Degas’s anarchistic retreat in his maison d’artiste as the last instance of

Introduction

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the artist’s life-long avant-gardism in his appropriation and recreation of space.

Notes 1

See Lemoisne 1984, I, p. 1, for the quotation. In 1897 Roger Marx had already written of Degas: “Aujourd’hui, l’isolement auquel Degas s’est complu depuis onze ans, le fait tout ensemble ignoré et célèbre.” In that article, Marx had defined him as “le plus classique des maîtres”: Marx, 1897. In 1912, Louis Hourticq wrote that “M. Degas jouit de ce privilège d’être à la fois illustre et très peu connu”: Hourticq, 1912. Degas was not alone in his desire to be illustrious and unknown, at the turn of the last century. “Illustrious and unknown” was an oftrepeated formula, running as a kind of subtitle to the biography of the modernist artist. In a letter to Joachim Gasquet of 30 April 1896, Paul Cézanne had written in anger against publicity: “But I curse the Geffroys and the few characters who, for the sake of writing an article for fifty francs, have drawn the attention of the public to me. All my life I have worked to be able to earn my living, but I thought that one could do painting without attracting attention to one’s private life. Certainly, an artist wishes to raise himself intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain obscure. The pleasure must be found in the work.”: Cézanne, 1995, p. 245. Paul Flat, writing in 1899 on the occasion of the opening of the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris and after the death of Gustave Moreau, stated of this last that, “De lui, certes, on peut dire en toute justice, et sans jouer sur les mots, qu’il fut à la fois illustre et inconnu; car son nom, qui signifiait pour les délicats l’art le plus complexe, le plus varié, le plus moderne de notre temps, n’éveillait aucun écho dans le public.”: Flat, n. d., p. 5. 2 Loyrette’s biography suffers from the same lack of interpretation that Kathleen Adler found in the curatorial work behind the Degas exhibition held in 1988-89 in Paris, New York and Ottawa. As Adler wrote, the show was “encyclopedic in its intention,” its catalogue tending “to stick to ‘facts’ ” such as dates of previous exhibitions, dating and provenance of works, “seen to be the ‘real business’ of art history, with other concerns either marginalized or ignored completely.” Drawing attention to the numerous exhibitions and publications devoted to Degas all along the 1980s, Adler pointed to “the splits and divisions, many of them unbridgeable” brought forth in the practice of art history by the discussion of such issues as Degas’s techniques, his relationship to past art, his anti-Semitism, his misogyny and more. While biography features “relatively little” in current accounts of Degas, Adler justly noted that “A fascination with psychobiography, however, is rife with in the Degas literature, often involved with establishing whether he was a ‘goodie’ or a ‘baddie’.” In the disparate and contradictory literature on Degas, Adler pointed out to the “uncertainty” and “the possibilities that the work of Degas offers for polysemic, multilayered readings, in which everything remains in doubt” as the main reasons behind “the intensity of the preoccupation with Degas.” Summing up the state of the Degas literature, for Adler, “While ‘Degas’ remains the core of the discussion, his apotheosis, which he himself ironically staged in an often-

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Mapping Degas

reproduced photograph of 1885, is the inevitable goal.”: Adler, 1990. Degas found an element of role play necessary in assuming a public persona, and in the photograph alluded to by Adler he staged a tableau vivant of The Apotheosis of Homer by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, with himself as Homer (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris). Also see Thomson, 1985-86 for a review of the exhibitions and publications on Degas that appeared in the early 1980s. 3 See for instance Higonnet, 1990; Nord, 2006; Degas, 1984; Degas, 2012. 4 See Carol Armstrong’s Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas, published in 1991. 5 Both Loyrette and Kendall have authored many works on Degas. Loyrette has written various articles on the artist as well as the biography Degas (1991). He was also the curator of the exhibition Degas e l’Italia, held in Rome in 1984 and one of the curators of the 1988-89 exhibition Degas. Kendall has written numerous books on Degas: Degas Landscapes (1992), Degas Backstage (1996), Degas Beyond Impressionism (1996), Degas and the Little Dancer (1997), Degas and the Dance (2002) and Degas and the Art of Japan (2007), both written with Jill DeVonyar, and Degas by Himself (2004). For feminist accounts of Degas see Griselda Pollock and Richard Kendall, Dealing with Degas. Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision (1992) and Anthea Callen, The Spectacular Body. Science, Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas, 1995. Also see Broude, 1977; Broude, 1988; Broude, 1993 and Lipton, 1986. 6 Soussloff, 2005, p. 10. 7 See on this Crisci-Richardson, 2011. 8 Historians of literature need to take both the self and the self-fashioning of writers into account if they want a “grasp of art’s concrete functions in relations to individuals and to institutions” and if they do not wish to “drift back toward a conception of art as addressed to a timeless, cultureless, universal human essence or, alternatively, as a self-regarding, autonomous, closed system- in either case, art as opposed to social life.” Greenblatt’s warnings can be applied to art history: “If interpretation limits itself to the behaviour of the author, it becomes literary biography (in either a conventionally historical or psychoanalytic mode) and risks losing a sense of the larger networks of meaning in which both the author and his works participate. If, alternatively, literature is viewed exclusively as the expression of social rules and instructions, it risks being absorbed into an entirely ideological superstructure. (…) Finally, if literature is seen only as a detached reflection upon the prevailing behavioural codes, a view from a safe distance, we drastically diminish our grasp of art’s concrete functions in relations to individuals and to institutions, both of which shrink into an obligatory ‘historical background’ that adds little to our understanding.”: Greenblatt, 1980, pp. 1-4. 9 See on this Chu, 2007. 10 See Seigel, 1986. 11 Greenblatt, 1980, pp. 7-8. 12 See McMullen, 1984. 13 See Loyrette, 1991.

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14 “The Renaissance was such a period: as intellectuals emerged from the Church with an independent lay status, they had to re-conceive their relation to power and particularly to the increasing power of the royal courts.” : Greenblatt, 1980, p. 36. 15 Shiff, 1984, p. xv. 16 Schilling, 2003. 17 Certeau, 1984, pp. xii-xiii. 18 Certeau, 1984, p. xxii. 19 Certeau, 1984, p. 96. 20 Rodger, 1993, pp. 1-18. Also see Thompson, 2003. 21 This would change with the defeat of France at the hands of the Prussians in 1870 and the installation of the resentfully nationalistic Third Republic, when Degas would seek the reference to Northern-ness in the works of French Rococo painters of the eighteenth century such as Watteau. See Banks, 1977 for an exploration of how eighteenth-century French Rococo incorporated a taste for Flemish art as much as a taste for Dutch realism. 22 Bourdieu, 1993. 23 Lemoisne,1921. 24 Reff, 1976 b, I, p. 4. 25 Vollard, 1938, pp. 98-9. 26 Valéry wrote to André Lebey in July 1906: “J’ai dîné aussi chez Degas, assez aplati par les 72 ans qu’il vient d’accomplir. Il m’a demandé de tes nouvelles. Sur le mur, il avait accroché un tableau de son jeune temps, du temps où Poussin le poursuivait. Ce tableau assez loin d’être achevé, s’intitule Jeunes filles spartiates défiant les garçons à la lutte.”: Valéry, 1952, p. 71. 27 He was the son of Louise and Ludovic Halévy, close friends of Degas, and the author of Degas parle (1960), consisting of excerpts from a journal that he kept from 1888 as an adolescent. Degas had then been a regular guest at the family’s dinners, and the young Daniel was impressed by the painter’s witty remarks. He recorded these in his journal, along with conversations, episodes and anecdotes, which were then edited for publication. 28 See the introduction by Daniel Halévy to Guérin, 1947, pp. 5-7 29 Halévy in Guérin, 1947, pp. 5-7. 30 O’Brien, 1922, pp. 105-6. 31 Malingue, 2003, p. 218. 32 Valéry, 1965, pp. 71-2. 33 See Pinchon, 2004. 34 See on this Crisci-Richardson, 2012 a. 35 In Paris, which was the centre of French anarchism from the 1880s, numerous anarchists were found among “those attracted to its past of crafts, local life and revolution” and those “fearing the onslaught of rapid change.” The anarchists also “felt that the unique quality of local life had contributed to Parisian centrality to the French revolutionary past in that the city’s many neighborhoods were self-enclosed worlds that fostered a local sense of intimacy among their inhabitants.”: Varias, 1996, p. 13.

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Mapping Degas

As Varias writes, while Kropotkin believed craftsmen to be “superior workers and sharper in their wits than their modern industrial counterparts,” communal intimacy was for Kropotkin “a pre-requisite for revolutionary action, believing that the neighbourhood club and the barricade were one in possessing the power to instigate people to unite within close intimate quarters and offer a sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ Anarchists envisioned a Romantic setting that differed from what they conceived to be the abstract backdrop of Marx’s proletarian revolt. It is also evident that they were disturbed at the thought that modernizing tendencies of the late nineteenth century were besieging their mythically envisioned Paris and leaving it in danger of obsolescence.”: Varias, 1996, p. 14. 37 Varias, 1996, pp. 16-7 and p. 39. Also see on the topic of anarchism among artists: Halperin, 1988 and Weisberg, ed., 2001. 38 According to Wilson, anti-Semitism (accompanied by the emergence of antiSemitic literature, leagues and groups), anti-Protestantism, and anti-Freemasonry were new social and ideological phenomena in France, with their distinct history of mutation from stereotyped prejudices diffused all over Europe into an organized movement and ideology, a mutation occurred in the 1880s-90s in a time of economic crisis. Anti-Semitism and anti-Protestantism were found at all levels of society and political belief, including among socialists, but especially among bourgeois and lower middle classes. They represented “one aspect of a general reaction to “modernization” and the experience of social change,” in which Jews, Protestants and Freemasons were seen as “foreign elements in French society.” They were all seen, together with the politicians and intellectuals, as “the agents of social change; they were symbols of confusion and alteration. Against them, to be safe from the threat which they posed, anti-Semites affirmed and invoked a stable social order, stable moral values, immutable and absolute categories.” Wilson, 1982, p. XVI, p. 83 and p. 145. 39 Wilson, 1982, p. 170. The crash of the Union Générale was only one of the financial and business scandals for which Jews, Protestants were held responsible by the anti-Semitic press in France. Other national disasters attributed by the latter to Stock Exchange capitalists and foreigners in general were the Panama scandal (1892), the failure of the Comptoir des Métaux and of the Comptoir d’Escomptes and the Dreyfus Affair. But, as Wilson writes, these crises and scandals must be related “to certain structural features of nineteenth-century capitalism in France” where “the financial scandal was normal rather than abnormal, the natural corollary of a system which combined a high level of state economic patronage with political corruption and a strong penchant for speculative rather than “safe” financial dealings. Such a system needed and attracted small investors, but ruined many of them,” who sought “if not redress, then explanation, and were ready to heed those who claimed to discern behind the apparent chaos of Stock Exchange and credit operations, the unseen hand of the Jews.”: Wilson, 1982, pp. 248-50. 40 See Hause, 1989. 41 See Paris, 1988; Loyrette, Kendall, Thomson.

Introduction

32

42 See the 2013 exhibition Degas’ Method, curated by Line Clausen Pedersen at the Ny Carlsberg Glypthothek, Copenhagen, and Whitfield, 2013 for a review of the same exhibition. 43 “Degas seems to have believed for a while in the 1870s that modern life would offer the painter of sufficient skill a new set of characteristic physiognomies; he would be able to elaborate a repertoire of types, gestures and expressions to stand for his century and give the viewer the feeling of its life”: Clark, 1985, pp. 255-7. 44 Herbert, 1988, p. 34 and p. 303. 45 Lipton, 1986, pp. 182-90. 46 Armstrong, 1991, p.16 and p. 246. 47 Armstrong, 1991, p. 28 and p. 72. 48 Armstrong, 2000, pp. 34-5. 49 See Nord, 2006 and House, 2004. 50 This period, spanning the work produced by Degas after the last group exhibition of 1886, was defined as “beyond impressionism.” During these years Degas abandoned much of the subject matter that had made him famous and concentrated on images of dancers, women at their toilette, and bathers set in abstract contexts. These few themes, in conjunction with his unorthodox exploration of a range of techniques and materials, allowed the artist new inventive possibilities. 51 Degas was undoubtedly aware of the implications of the cult of personality among artists, in the sense provided by Svetlana Alpers’s definition of “the belief of painters in the greatness of the painters who came earlier and hence the desire to follow, to emulate them.”: Alpers, 2005, pp. 206-7. Alpers here refers to the link uniting Velázquez’s The Spinners to Titian’s Diana and Callisto and to Rubens’s Diana and Callisto as a chain of response and reference, through the practice of copying, to the greatness of another genius of the art of painting. The last link in the chain Titian-Rubens-Velázquez is Manet, who venerated the Spanish master as his ideal of painting. 52 Soussloff, 2005, p. 8. 53 As Soussloff explains, art history conforms to the dictates of the discipline created by Vasari, thanks to whom biography has been the dominant cultural and art-historical source for the construction of the image of the artist since the fifteenth century. Texts construct the notions of art, history and the artist. The figure of the artist is constructed, because it appeared as a historical and symbolic representation in an identifiable literary genre, the artist’s biography, transmitted from Antonio Manetti to Vasari to all subsequent generations of artists’ biographers and art historians. The concept of the artist was born with the genre of the artist’s biography, characterised by one feature: the repetition of anecdotes: Soussloff, 2005, p. 99. 54 As Soussloff writes, art-historians, deliberately or not, look back to a model of art-historical narrative in which the story of the artist is offered through a schematic structure of anecdotes. Artists, in their turn, are fed at the same sources and are implicated in a desirable mode of self-understanding which functions at the light of the same mythical narrative: Soussloff, 2005, p. 4.

33

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Mapping Degas

Goncourt, 1956, tome X, pp. 163-4. It is Silverman‘s argument that Goncourt’s theories on modern visionary artistic expression matured by 1900 into the art nouveau, a modern, metamorphic and organic style of interior decoration accompanying the shift in the meaning of “modernity” from the values embodied by the public monuments to progress and industrial technology (such as the Eiffel Tower) celebrated by the 1889 universal exhibition to the values of retreat into interiority and cultural tradition celebrated by the triumph of interior arts and crafts at the 1900 universal exhibition: see Silverman, 1989, pp. 4-7 . 57 Moore, 1890. 58 Degas’s use of a professional draughtsman for his perspectives and architectural drawings (such as appear in Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando) would be confirmed years later by Walter Sickert: see Gruetzner Robins, 1988. 59 See for instance Higonnet, 1990 and Nord, 2006. 60 Lemoisne, 1956, p. 90. 61 Loyrette, 1991. 62 Higonnet, 1990, pp. 46-7. 63 Milner, 1988, p. 3. 64 Greenblatt, 1980, p. 7. 65 The French avant-garde artists working in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century were following what Peter Ackroyd has defined, in his Albion. The Origins of the English Imagination, as a “territorial imperative,” that is “a powerful impulse,” by means of which “a local area can influence or guide all those who inhabit it.” Like the English writers, composers and artists studied by Ackroyd who “have been haunted by this sense of place, in which the echoic simplicities of past use and past tradition sanctify a certain spot of ground,” because “we owe much to the ground on which we dwell. It is the landscape and the dreamscape. It encourages a sense of longing and belonging,”Ackroyd, 2002. 66 De Marchi & Miegroet, 2006, p. 11. 67 Boogaart, 2004, p. 42. 68 “Interdisciplinary approaches have also extended the range of relevant evidence prospective scholars must consult in fashioning their town histories. Rather than merely mastering the archives of a single community, scholars are now expected to incorporate archaeological, material, and topographic evidence in their arguments.”: Boogaart, 2004, p. 15. 69 Boogaart, 2004, p. 19. 70 “Phenomenology offers an alternative model of how humans relate to (dwell in) their environment. From a Heideggerian perspective humans have already been “thrust” into an extant “world” (society and culture), so that we never confront the landscape as strangers or readers.”: Boogaart, 2004, pp. 69-71. 71 “The explanation of social behaviour is an art as well as a science because our interpretation depends not only on the proper empirical collection of the context, but more significantly relies upon an intuitive appreciation of it value. From this perspective, any effort to explain the power of place, or to identify a landscape’s hegemonic meaning, would constitute “ethnogeography” in so far that it would 56

Introduction

34

involve the art of interpreting the milieu on its own terms, thickly describing experience relative to the concepts, locales, institutions, and practices that define the native “lifeworld”, which in turn conditions the distinctive quality of “native” dwelling.”: Boogaart, 2004, p. 75. 72 They have treated spatial issues such as the representation or suggestion of the third dimension in two-dimensional form (perspective), the treatment of space in architecture and how architecture responds to a place and defines it, the issue of reception and the place of the beholder, the issue of the importance of the physical place of the works of art in museography. Spatial issues have always been treated also within the practice of connoisseurship. 73 DaCosta Kaufmann, 2004, pp. 6-7.

CHAPTER ONE PARIS

1. Businessmen In order to expose the myth that surrounds the life of Degas, it is important to delineate in this opening chapter the origins and social environment of the Degas family. In showing how reality and myth intersect in the cultural construction of the artist, in my narrative the historical background of the Degas family will intersect at some points with the various instances of the myth of Degas assigned by Degas himself and by his early biographers during his old age and immediately after his death. Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas was born on 19 July 1834 to Célestine Musson and Auguste Degas. He was named after his grandfathers, RenéHilaire Degas and Germain Musson, both merchants and speculators moving in a cosmopolitan business world. Célestine (1815-1847) was a Creole from New Orleans, Louisiana. She had arrived in Paris in 1817 with her widower father, Germain Musson, an entrepreneur in the silver and colonial trade in America.1 The Mussons had settled at 4 rue Pigalle, in the second arrondissement, the part of northern Paris at the foot of the Montmartre hill. Paris was then divided in twelve arrondissements or districts. This administrative division would be rearranged by Napoleon III in 1860, when the territory of the capital was extended to include the villages lying just beyond the city wall, and then divided in 20 arrondissements, each then divided in quartiers. The second arrondissement, where Degas was born in 1834, became in 1860 the ninth, where Degas lived his entire life as an artist. He died at 6 boulevard de Clichy, in the eighteenth arrondissement, though, since in 1912 he had been forced to leave the three floors he was renting at 37 rue VictorMassé. The building was destined to be demolished, and the aged Degas had to find new accommodation, a place where he was not happy and where he never did any artwork. Auguste Degas, the father of the painter, was a merchant banker, an occupation combining financial and mercantile activities. He was the

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eldest son of René-Hilaire, a resourceful and energetic man who had built for himself a dignified position in life. Born the son of a baker in 1770 in Orléans,2 René-Hilaire died a merchant banker in his summerhouse in the outskirts of Naples in 1859 (Fig. 1-1). He had settled in that city as a businessman in 1804. As a point of departure, we will consider what Degas told Paul Valéry about his paternal grandfather in July 1904, during a conversation about the French Revolution: Ce grand-père agiotait sur les blés pendant la Révolution. Un jour, en 1793, comme il était en affaires à la Bourse aux Grains qui se tenait alors au Palais Royal, un ami passe dans son dos et lui souffle: « F…s le camp!...Sauve-toi !... On est chez toi… ». Il ne perd pas de temps, emprunte tous les assignats qu’il peut se procurer sur la place, sort de Paris sur l’heure, crève deux chevaux, gagne Bordeaux, s’embarque sur un navire en partance. Le navire touche à Marseille. Ce navire, d’après le récit de Degas, charge à Marseille de la pierre ponce, ce qui me semble invraisemblable…Peut-être allait-il chercher du soufre en Sicile ? Monsieur Degas arrive enfin à Naples, où il s’établit. (…) Ce grand-père menacé de l’échafaud, et qui fuit si vivement le marché aux grains, avait été inscrit sur la liste des suspects pour avoir été signalé comme fiancé à l’une de ces fameuses « Jeunes vierges de Verdun », dont plusieurs payèrent de leur vie l’accueil qu’elles avaient fait en 1792, à l’armée prussienne envahissant la France pour rétablir la monarchie. Elles avaient reçu avec des fleurs et des drapeaux blancs ces troupes étrangères, ennemies pour les uns, alliées et libératrices pour les autres.3

Degas knew that his grandfather had started as a grain merchant in Paris, and that his business there during the Revolution was interrupted by rumours that René-Hilaire was engaging in illegal speculation. Degas passed on to Valéry this memory of his grandfather caught in a climate of denunciations and requisitions, where René-Hilaire was watched over by the revolutionary police. During the Terror, hoarding grain in the hope of higher prices was outlawed in an attempt to ward off the shortages of bread that fueled popular revolts. Indeed, the loi sur l’agiotage, adopted by the National Convention on 27 July 1793, declared hoarding of all foodstuffs a crime punishable by life sentence and confiscation of property. The circulation of foodstuffs being effectively under the control of the authorities, all merchants and shopkeepers stocking grains could be reported to the revolutionary tribunals as hoarders and be searched by the police.4 The Bourse was closed, and banking and doing business were risky occupations during the Terror.5 Degas, however, also believed and wanted his biographers to believe that René-Hilaire had escaped the

Paris

37

guillotine around 1792 because his fiancée was a royalist. In reality, RenéHilaire had left France in the spring of 1804, and because he was pursued by creditors, not because he was a monarchist. In his old age, when visiting Paris and strolling with the young Edgar, René-Hilaire is reported to have avoided crossing the Place de la Concorde, recalling for him the bloody days of the Terror.6 But there is no doubt that he was a liberal and a child of the Great Revolution. A shrewd man and a bold entrepreneur, René-Hilaire had started work as a baker with his father in Orléans before moving to Paris and entering the grain trade at the Corn Exchange. He lived in the rue de la Verrerie, in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, in commercial Paris, not far from the Bourse, the heart of a city that lived of consumption resting on trade, business, and finance.7 The evidence suggests that René-Hilaire did not leave Paris in a hurry in 1793. He lived in Paris until the bankruptcy of his trade in 1799, when a bailiff sealed his premises, and most likely he remained in Paris after that too. In April 1804, we find him mentioned again in a marriage contract in which the Neapolitan merchant Lorenzo Freppa consents to the marriage of his daughter Aurora (1783-1841) to René-Hilaire. He then left Paris, arriving in Naples sometime between April and June 1804. There, JeanBaptiste Bourguignon, a French businessman, employed him for a while. On July 6 1804, Renato Ilario Degas, “mercante francese al presente in Napoli,” married Aurora. Her father was reasonably well off. Her dowry included household linen, a mattress, sheets and blankets, shirts, socks, trousers. It included handkerchiefs, jewels, a satin dress, many pairs of shoes, and a bear-fur muff. Her dowry also brought 3000 Ducats that allowed René-Hilaire to become a business partner of Freppa & Fumo, the merchant firm of his father-in-law and his associate Michele Fumo. They dealt mainly in grain, cotton, and woollens, but also in leather, chemical products, china, crystal, brandy, and Parisian nouveautés such as fans, gloves, and eau de cologne. These were sent to Naples by Augustin Degas, René-Hilaire’s brother and also a merchant banker in Paris, where he in turn received shipments of cotton from Naples. Seven children would be born to René-Hilaire and Aurora: Rose (1805-1879), Auguste (1807-1874), Henri (1809-1879), Edouard (18111870), Achille (1812-1875), Laure (1814-1897), and Stephanie, known as Fanny (1819-1901). In November 1808, René-Hilaire was able to expand his business in Naples by setting himself up as a moneychanger, with a shop right in the heart of the city, at 29 strada san Giacomo. Much has been made of the fact that René-Hilaire’s appointment as a moneychanger was signed by Joachim-Napoleon Murat, General and Marshal of France (he had fought at the Battle of the Nile in 1798) and King of Naples since

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Chapter One

August 1808. But there was nothing remarkable in the circumstance, all such appointments being routinely signed by the King. It is true however that the flamboyant Murat, always in need of money, previously in Paris had made the acquaintance of Augustin Degas, who by 1810 would establish his Banque Degas in the rue des Pyramides.8 In Naples, meanwhile, René-Hilaire’s business thrived in the peculiar political and economic circumstances of the Bonaparte domination in the Italian peninsula. Napoleon had been crowned King of Italy in Milan in the spring of 1805 and the Bourbon kingdom of Naples would soon fall into

Fig. 1-1 Portrait of René-Hilaire Degas, 1857, oil on canvas, cm 53 x 41, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

his hands. With France at war against England and Spain since 1793, European markets languished due to Napoleon’s Continental Blockade on British imports, cotton being the major item, vital to European textile industries, and especially to Paris, then the centre of the linen market. European cotton traders turned to the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, where cotton grew profusely and labour was cheap. Businessmen and financiers came to southern Italy from all over Europe converging on Naples.9 RenéHilaire’s merchant bank in Naples thrived during the ten years of French rule, and subsequently under the Bourbons, restored to their dominion over Southern Italy. There, for lack of a local business class, monopolies

Paris

39

on tobacco, salt, gambling, investment in road, railway and naval transport were all open to foreign capitalist initiative, particularly French. In Naples, the Degas family controlled the collection of salt tax, and invested in building the railway network.10 René-Hilaire did well: a self-made man, a baker’s son who became a merchant banker, he embodied the Napoleonic spirit of “the career open to talent, the talismanic precept of bourgeois revolution.”11 Career, talent, bourgeois revolution: these terms would not have displeased the young Edgar, engaged as he was in the modern pursuit of self-fashioning, as we will see. But the aged Edgar, in the aforementioned conversations with Valéry and Lemoisne in the early 1900s, was a very different man from the young one: he was still engaged in a self-fashioning enterprise, but the terms of it had changed. He was now a fin-de-siècle traditionalist, an anarchist indulging in stereotypical anti-Semitism and anti-Protestantism, and was revered by such fanatic Catholics as the young painter Maurice Denis, who was then also a journalist for Degas’s favourite newspaper, La Libre Parole.12 For this nostalgic Degas, the remote image of a reactionary grand-father, rather than that of an opportunistic merchant, made a more desirable beginning for an autobiography, or rather, for a biography which others would write by collecting every detail that escaped from the lips of a man who notoriously detested talking about his life. As for Degas’s biographers, in his Degas Danse Dessin (1938), Valéry stressed the cultured Degas: “nourri aux lettres classiques” and “homme de goût” whose political ideas were “simples, péremptoires, parisiennes.” Degas read Edouard Drumont’s articles every day and adored France while despising Frenchmen. His political ideal, wrote Valéry, was “haute et puérile.” Degas was an anarchist who criticised the corruption, scandals, and venality of the Third Republic, a reaction common at the time to many writers and artists who “voyaient d’assez loin ces désordres, en jouissaient selon leur nature, faisaient des mots terribles, élaboraient leurs dégoûts, distillaient des sentiments populaires, une essence d’anarchie pure et d’autocratisme parfait.”13 This agrees with Daniel Halévy’s remark that Degas admired and knew the works of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the anarchist philosopher who had authored such texts as Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (1840) and Du Principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale (1865) and had been a friend of Gustave Courbet.14 Just like Goncourt’s opinion of a nervous Degas discussed in the introduction to this book, Halévy and Valéry’s pronouncements on the anarchist Degas have rarely attracted attention, and have succumbed to Lemoisne’s aristocratised Right-wing Degas. As we will see later in this chapter, for Lemoisne, the idea of a monarchist René-Hilaire invoked at the origin of the family of

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Chapter One

the painter fitted the myth of the artistocratic Degas that he promoted in his writing.15

2. Auguste Degas The painter’s father, Auguste, was born in Naples in 1807. There he lived and as a young man worked as a merchant banker with his father, who in the early 1820s had moved to a new business and home address at 53 Calata Trinità Maggiore. In May 1825, René-Hilaire took Auguste to Paris, intending to enrol him in a commerce school, with a view to a commercial apprenticeship. It was the custom for cosmopolitan bourgeois families concerned in foreign trade, to place their sons in the houses of their overseas correspondents “to learn office routine, languages and accounting, and to get some sense of the trade.”16 But, as René-Hilaire wrote from Paris to his wife Aurora in Naples, setting up their son Auguste to become a businessman was not going to be easy: the young man, whom he elsewhere described as vague and indecisive, had not the basic notions of how to balance the books. Naturally, he would have apprenticed Auguste to uncle Augustin, merchant banker in the rue des Pyramides. But on arriving in Paris, René-Hilaire had found Augustin struggling after the death of his wife. As he wrote to Aurora, René-Hilaire feared that the idleness of his brother “serait très nuisible à Auguste, qui a besoin d’être stimulé.” Professional prospects for Auguste were not looking good, but they were in Paris, after all, and René-Hilaire took his son to the theatre. At the Comédie Française they saw celebrated actors of the day, including Talma, Lafond, and Mademoiselle Mars, and, if the plan of fixing Auguste in Paris this time came to nothing, the beauty of the city indelibly impressed the young man. Smitten with the Parisian urban spectacle, Auguste wrote to his mother: “La città vi assicuro che è una cosa da vedersi.” He went back to Naples eventually, and stayed in business partnership with his father. In 1832, Auguste was finally able to settle in Paris as a merchant banker. His father provided him with a starting capital of 144 886 lire, a sum that was not immense, but that Auguste in any event was not able to use fruitfully. He had no business acumen, and was left to his own devices. While René-Hilaire continued to operate in Naples, through the Degas père et fils with his other three sons, Henri, Edouard, and Achille, in Paris, Auguste began to run up debt. Eventually, at his death in 1874, the eldest son, Edgar the painter, would assume the burden of the debts that brought about the final collapse of the family business.17

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41

Auguste played a large role in shaping the artistic career of his son. At first his own ignorance of business matters, so concisely stated by his father in a letter from Paris, and Auguste’s few lines in Italian, added in a corner of the same letter to his family in Naples, asking how were the canaries under the roof and whether they had feathered their nest yet, suggest a dreaming ingenuity appropriate to youth. Then, retrospectively, they also foreshadow his lifelong ineptitude for business making and his love for the arts. When we consider his enthusiasm for Paris, his love of music, and his passion for the painting of the Italian Primitives of the Quattrocento, Auguste is revealed to be a sensitive individual, appropriately in place in the Paris of the Romantic era. When he arrived there, aged 18 on his first visit in 1825, King Charles X (1824-1830) reigned, the successor to Louis XVIII (1814-1824), in whose person the Restoration had brought back to France the Bourbon regime. They were peculiar times. While bourgeois liberalism firmly established itself in France, the Restoration of the ancient Bourbon monarchy and the return of many émigrés both fuelled and were nourished by a Christian culture that impressed its spirituality on the poetry, literature, and arts produced in the Paris of the Romantic age.18 This modern sensibility featured an intensely nostalgic attitude towards an irretrievable past, the pre-revolutionary time. Also really new in Romantic Paris was the fervour with which poetry and the arts were promoted, and the intellectual prominence that was now accorded to poets, writers, composers, and artists.19 This artistic and intellectual fervour was evident in the extraordinary programme of historicist reconstruction of Paris undertaken by both the municipal authorities and the Ministry of Interior during the reign of Louis-Philippe d’Orléans (1830-1848). The bourgeois King, as he was called, had been brought to the throne after three days of riots in July 1830 (the Trois Glorieuses of July 27-29), following a Bourbon attempt to curtail civil rights such as the freedom of the press. The July Monarchy instituted by the Orléans saw as its mission a programme of reconciliation of the French nation with the memories and divergent political legacies of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. This programme translated into a cultural politics aiming to create in the capital an eclectic urban atmosphere that integrated and kept alive the memory of different political traditions, all subsumed in the liberalism of the Orléans monarchy. Historicism was the artistic style of this programme of political modernity. Revivals, such as the Greek, the Gothic, and the Catholic one, coexisted as visual languages of the reconciliation promoted and embodied by Louis Philippe, the liberal King. A vast programme of monumental restoration and reconstruction in different artistic styles aimed “to produce spaces

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Chapter One

with the power to evoke history.”20 Along with this eclecticism, and well before Baron Haussmann, entire neighbourhoods were built, especially on the Right Bank, the streets homogeneously lined with Restoration apartment buildings typically signalled by the green outdoor shutters: in Paris, bourgeois modernity also meant “an architecture of control” featuring “qualities of propriety, restraint, and rational order,” as has been written.21 It was not just an architectural makeover, however. The Paris that had captivated Auguste in 1825 and where he came to live in 1832 was that, as Etienne-Jean Delécluze put it, of the “anarchie romantique.”22 Paris was springing to the life of political and cultural modernity: liberalism pervaded artistic creation and intellectual confrontation. Feminists such as Marie d’Agoult, political exiles and revolutionaries such as Lajos Kossuth, Giuseppe Mazzini, Daniele Manin, and Karl Marx, who met Friedrich Engels while living in Paris in the early 1840s, brought a spirit of freedom and political agency, and a fresh vitality to a society who lived and expressed itself intensely in the streets, arcades, cafés, restaurants, theatres, artists’ studios, in the salons, and in the press. An extraordinary artistic fervour was in the air: artists were working at monuments, churches, and public spaces. Decorative schemes were commissioned to adorn Catholic churches with paintings and sculptures, as in the case of the neo-Greek Church of the Madeleine, Saint-Merri, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. New churches were built, such as Notre-Dame-de-Lorette or Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, others restored, for instance Notre-Dame-de-Paris. The Pantheon was returned to the Catholic cult as the church of Sainte-Geneviève, while Napoleonic monuments were completed, such as the Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile, and the Arc du Carrousel. While Napoleon’s ashes returned to rest forever in the Church of the Invalides in 1840, the Place de la Révolution, where the guillotine performed so many executions of aristocrats, was re-arranged with fountains, statues, and an Egyptian obelisk, and renamed as Place de la Concorde. In the Place de la Bastille, Louis-Philippe approved plans for the July Column, completed in 1840. Topped by the genius of Liberty, it celebrated those who had died fighting during the Revolution in 1830.23 When he came to Paris in 1832, Auguste, who had grown up in Naples surrounded by art and books, and had taken music and drawing lessons as any respectable bourgeois child, embraced in full the Parisian sensibility for artistic creation, and in particular the taste for the Christian Primitivist aesthetic. Indeed, he comes across as quite a rebel, at least in spirit, against his father René-Hilaire, the rational, hard-working, and successful businessman. Auguste was, in other words, an odd bourgeois, a bohemian. In the letters written to relatives by his wife Célestine during their

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marriage he appears as a secluded person, selfishly insensitive to his young wife’s desire for social life. The personality of this inwardly, musicand art-loving merchant banker who went about business nonsensically, conjures, in great contrast to his father René-Hilaire, a purely spiritual presence. Degas perceived this ethereal quality and fixed it in the ghostly appearance of his father, in the few portraits he painted of him. In a double portrait of Auguste and the musician Lorenzo Pagans, Auguste is shown sitting in the background, recumbent and concerned only with the music while the performing Pagans is accorded the main stance (Fig. 1-2). Motherless from the age of 13, Degas was then confronted with two such contrasting figures, the pragmatic, sceptical grandfather René-Hilaire, a skilled manager of time and money, a fortune-building son of the French Revolution, and the dreaming Auguste, who moved to Paris, and wasted his father’s property, unable to embourgeoiser himself effectively by integrating with the money-making trend of his position. Degas made important references to these two men in his painting. In Degas’s portrait of his grandfather (Fig. 1-1), René-Hilaire has the powerful presence of the individual in control of his destiny and of the world he has forged, holding his walking stick more as an allusion to a life of activity and dominance than to the failings of old age. By contrast, in Degas’s portrait of his father, Auguste in a sense barely emerges as a presence; he is more an abstraction, either failing to gain more concrete substance in his son’s assertion, or imagined and revealed diverting himself and smiling irresponsibly.

Fig. 1-2 Auguste Degas and Lorenzo Pagans, 1871-72, oil on canvas, cm 54.5 x 40, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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The relationship between Auguste and Edgar was not without misunderstanding. As he revealed in his letters of the late 1850s to his aunt Laure Bellelli, Degas at times felt that his father was not fully supportive of his ambition to become an artist. She explained to him that Auguste simply had not enough money to support him in his artistic vocation, having spent it all in living beyond his means. It seems that both Auguste and his sons, including Edgar, suffered from a sense of social and personal superiority because they dealt, among other things, in money.24 Indeed, the painter’s younger brothers, Achille and René, in their social aspiration to rank, split their surname in two syllables, producing a particle and a totally bogus titre de noblesse (de Gas).25 But rather than living up to an aristocratic ideal, the siblings somehow confirmed the roguery in the family with a series of inopportune, if not criminal, initiatives. In the early 1870s, René abandoned his wife (and cousin) Estelle Musson, and their children, to run off with another woman. In 1875, outside the Paris Stock Exchange, Achille fired a revolver to scare the husband of his ex-lover ballerina. He attracted attention in the Parisian press, and went to jail. All this was an embarrassment for Degas, who yearned for fame of a different nature.26 Degas, then, was well aware that the social position of his family was shaky at best, that his grand-father had worked hard to make life comfortable, and that their financial situation was troubled, many years before his father’s death (February 1874) and the consequent collapse of the family firm. The artist, now head of the family, had to pay off the inherited debts by turning out more saleable “wares,” as he called his artworks.27 For Degas the problems of money and decline into the proletariat always loomed ahead. In Degas’s life, 1874 was not a year of major rupture in self-awareness and class consciousness, as some accounts suggest, but an expected, if sudden, catastrophe: it is clear that Degas since youth was well aware of his uncertain social and financial position, of his bohemianism.

3. Right-Bank We now look at Degas’s Parisian-ness, his belonging to the Right Bank, the part of Paris known since the Middle-Ages as “Ville,” the section of the town which in the nineteenth century merchants and bankers shared with artists, performers, and entertainers of various kinds. Far from being perceived as conflicting, the contiguity of work and pleasure indicated on the one hand the necessities of urban existence and on the other recalled the distinctive history of the city of Paris. In its historic tripartite division of “Ville,” “Cité,” and “Université,” each area was

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assigned its function within the urban context. Here I will also characterise Right-Bank Parisian-ness as a space and as a cultural construction of rebellious political will. We do not know how a bride was chosen for Auguste. In order to provide his son with a patrimony to match Célestine‘s dowry (122.000 francs, part of which came from the sale of the black slave her father had given her as a present back in New Orleans), René-Hilaire mortgaged palazzo Pignatelli, the townhouse in Naples that he had bought, dilapidated floor by dilapidated floor, in the early 1820s, and renovated at great expense. At the date of his marriage contract of 7 July 1832, Auguste lived at 10 rue de la Tour des Dames, a street where lived famous actors of the revolutionary days, such as Talma, Mademoiselle Mars, and Mademoiselle Duchesnois. These “comédiens de l’Empereur” all survived the fall of the Empire, retaining strong Bonapartist feelings and conferring a particular atmosphere to the Nouvelle Athènes. Talma of the Comédie Française had been a friend of Napoleon since 1792, when, as a soldier fond of theatre and opera, he lived in cheap accommodation near the Palais Royal.28 Talma was also a favourite actor of René-Hilaire, who during his visit to Paris in 1825 actually had made a point of taking Auguste to see him, initiating Auguste to the Parisian love of theatre which would be passed on to Edgar. Once married, Auguste and Célestine moved in with Germain Musson at 8 rue Saint-Georges. At this address Edgar was born in 1834. The quartier Saint-Georges was a newly-built lively neighbourhood that had among its residents actors, Opéra dancers, writers, musicians, and politicians. The mansion of the Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers was in the Place Saint-Georges, only steps away from the neo-Renaissance hôtel of La Païva, a wealthy courtesan.29 The church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, where Auguste married Célestine and Edgar was christened, was a building site between 1823 and 1836. The presence of painters, gilders, and sculptors working at the new church attracted harlots, and many artists also lived in this part of town.30 Between 1845 and 1857, at 58 rue de Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, lived Eugène Delacroix, a painter much revered by Degas. Théodore Géricault had lived at 23 rue des Martyrs between 1813 and 1818, and the painters Horace Vernet and Paul Delaroche at rue de la Tour-des-Dames, in the 1830s, and Isabey, Gavarni, and Ary Scheffer, who bought a house in the rue Chaptal in 1830, while still keeping for some years an atelier in the rue de La Rochefoucauld close by. For a painter, the area offered such advantages as the availability of spacious houses with enough room for an atelier filled with light, because the area was not yet intensely crowded. Also, it was close to the

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boulevards, to the Opéra, and to all the urban amenities attended by prospective wealthy patrons.31 Descending from the city boundary, at the foot of the Montmartre hill, and heading in the direction of the city, in the 1830s one would cross vast and pleasant green areas, and in a few minutes reach such places as the Jardins de Tivoli, within it an amusement park with a popular dance-hall, cross the rue de la Victoire, and find the Théâtre Olympique and the Opéra on the rue Lepelletier. Finally, one would reach the boulevards with their shops and cafés such as Frascati, with their gambling house, the Bains Chinois, the Théâtre des Variétés and the Théâtre des Italiens. Descending towards the Palais Royal, one encountered the Théâtre Feydeau, opposite the Bourse de Commerce, and through the Chausseé d’Antin, reach the Banque de France, all within walking distance. There stood the Palais Royal, the residence of LouisPhilippe, the centre of political power, and the monument to that power. With its garden open to the public and its arcades occupied by restaurants and luxury shops, it embodied in Paris the convergence of the commercial and the financial with the political, a convergence that lay at the core of the power of the July Monarchy. In its social mix, the Palais Royal represented the fondness of Parisian society for social life, money, art, and luxury.32 Auguste was an undistinguished young man running a small merchant-banking firm in a district where art, theatre, power, and money went happily hand in hand. Determined that some of this money flow their way, in November 1835 Auguste and his father-in-law, with whom he was living, planned to start business in Le Havre. From there Musson planned to expand their trade, mainly in cotton, over the Atlantic, through his commercial contacts back in America. Aurora, Auguste’s mother, and his sisters Laure and Fanny were then visiting in Paris. They had been accompanied there by Auguste’s brother Henri, who had left them in Paris and continued on to London. Aurora, Laure, and Fanny had already visited London, in August 1835, returning to Paris on September 17. Here, through Aurora’s correspondence with her husband in Naples, strong pressure was exerted on René-Hilaire on the expectation that he should back Auguste financially in the business venture planned by Musson at Le Havre. René-Hilaire’s reply came promptly: after a preamble recommending that Aurora and the daughters avoid impostors and watch their luxury expenses in Paris, he declared that he was in no position to provide the 1200 francs Auguste and Musson expected from him. The scheme was well beyond his possibilities, and in his letter he raged in wonder at the ease with which the two gentlemen (his own son and Musson) had embarrassed him with such an immodest request, knowing very well that he had three other sons to set up. In

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another letter to Aurora of December 1835, he remarked that Auguste, indecisive as usual, and under the influence of his father-in-law and business partner Musson, had been submitting for the past two years lofty business plans that had all fallen through, and over-estimating RenéHilaire’s moderate means. To Auguste in Paris, the city radiating grandeur and opulence as huge fortunes were being made, Naples and his father, touchy and frugal, must have seemed by now like another world. Dreaming big plans, Auguste survived modestly in business. Later, and also while in partnership with his sons Achille and René, he operated ineffectually until his death in 1874. Degas was born and grew up in these circumstances, learning the meaning of poverty and debt, the background for his existential and artistic bohemianism and anarchism. This is the cityscape and the construction of Parisian-ness in which the Impressionist avant-garde and Degas and his art existed and must be understood. This construction of Parisian-ness implied an historical inclination to rebellion, revolution, and bourgeois hostility to absolutism and aristocratic values of power. In 1636 Richelieu had bequeathed the Palais Royal to Louis XIII, under the condition that it would always remain with the Crown. The palace saw the infancy and youth of Louis XIV and of his brother Philippe, duc de Chartres and later d’Orléans, the future Monsieur. It was the theatre of the events of the Fronde, the first revolt that seriously threatened the French monarchy. Ignoring Richelieu’s will, Louis XIV got rid of the Palais Royal in 1692 by making a present to his brother Orléans. Louis XIV had come to dislike the disobedient and fickle city of Paris, and left for Versailles, his citadel of power, where he kept the aristocracy under tight control. When the Sun King went to his imposing chateau at Versailles, Monsieur, his effeminate and refined brother, went to Paris and to the Palais Royal. In this split that is as much psychological as geographical, resides an essential aspect of Parisian identity and social consciousness: a tradition of Parisian-ness as revolution. The Orléans were princes of the blood who appreciated the company of Parisian bourgeois, who in turn used the support of the Orléans in their opposition to the royal power. An interesting instance of the closeness and alliance between the Orléans and the Parisian bourgeois and of their effects on the urban environment is in the fact that the gardens of the Palais Royal were open to the public, while its arcades housed shops rented out as a source of income for the Orléans. The mixed crowds attracted by the public gardens and the fact that the Orléans estate was entirely forbidden to police inspection favoured the development on this site of such illicit activities as prostitution and political agitation.33 Loose morals, one of the urban and sociological instances of Right-Bank Parisian-ness, were the urban

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political legacy of the Orléans family, rooted in the exceptional mixture of licit and illicit, of aristocracy and bourgeoisie, of sophistication and grossness, of work and entertainment, of luxury and bad taste, commerce and art, taking place in the Orléans enclave, safe from police control. Parisian painting was born in this space imbued with revolutionary meanings. At the death of Monsieur in 1701, his son Philippe d’Orléans, the future Regent, inherited the Palais Royal as well as the Saint-Cloud property. His bad relationship with his uncle Louis XIV meant that the new duc d’Orléans had to leave Versailles for Paris. His flamboyant lifestyle put in vogue attendance of the Opera, theatre, and the arts, rejected at Versailles due to the King’s bigotry in old age. Paris under the Regency was a debauched place. Entertaining dinners and various obscenities took place at the Palais Royal, which remained the political and artistic centre of France. A patron of the arts and a connoisseur of painting, the Regent inherited part of Monsieur’s art collection and assembled his own art collection, equal in greatness to that of the King of France.34 He purchased artworks, attended the sales of the great European collections of his day, and it was in order to cater for his needs that in this part of Paris, the political heart of the city, the modern art market came into existence, with its art dealers and the Hôtel Drouot, the auction house of the city.35 The Regent, furthermore, opened his gallery to artists, connoisseurs, and amateurs, and in the Palais Royal, therefore, were consolidated, decades before the French Revolution, ideas of cross-class sociability as well as the idea of the public exhibition of an artistic patrimony already perceived as belonging to the people. Unlike the King who kept his collection closed to the public, Orléans was already recognised as “l’initiateur d’une prise de conscience progressive de l’importance d’un patrimoine commun” and his collection regarded as the place “where one could instruct oneself in all the manners and ages of Painting,” as wrote La Font de Saint-Yenne in 1747.36 In mapping Degas and locating his avant-gardism and his bohemianism I will be pinpointing his progress in just this space of political will and cultural appropriation, the Parisian modernity born in the Palais Royal, where authority endorsed urban disorder rather than collided with it. During the reign of the socalled bourgeois King, Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, work and entertainment became the two constituents essential to a definition of the Parisian spirit. This King had nothing of the majesty of the ancient great Kings of France. The bourgeoisie treated him with familiarity. The journalists, to whom he owed the crown, made it clear that they could have taken it off him anytime, which they did as soon as he tried to govern without them.37 The typical Parisian living under Louis-Philippe had two main inclinations: “il

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flâne et il s’enrichit,” his soul “activated by two magnetic poles”: pleasure and business-making.38 In his article “Le Quartier Saint-Jacques et la Chaussée d’Antin,” published in 1832 in the Revue de Paris, Armand Bazin introduced readers to the Parisian way of connecting work and pleasure by taking them for a symbolic and instructive walk in the two most significant and contrasting parts of the capital, the Quartier SaintJacques, on the Left Bank, and the Chaussée d’Antin, on the Right Bank. What connects the gloomy and muddy Quartier Saint-Jacques, the territory of medieval schools aspiring to knowledge and inhabited by a population of indigents, to the Chaussée-d’Antin, “brillant séjour du luxe et de l’opulence,” is that the former part of town is the antechamber of the latter. For the purposes of a proper Parisian education, one has to have experienced both extremes once in one’s life before being able to call oneself a man. One no longer studies for the pure pleasure of knowledge, writes Bazin; one studies because in Paris education is a more edifying way to achieve a life of pleasurable enjoyment and elegance. This functional relationship of means to end is what connects, in a Parisian existence, the Quartier Saint-Jacques to the Chaussée-d’Antin.39 The promised land of all ambition and happiness, the Chaussée-d’Antin was the faubourg Saint-Germain of the “nouveau régime,” open to anyone, regardless of provenance, social origin, titles, and mores, provided one behave “nobly” and “contribute to the common splendour.” This lucky country, with no history and no monuments to show because it is a new urban space, will acknowledge across its borders only two entities, the Bois de Boulogne and the Bourse. It might be a repository of intrigue, treachery, ignorance, and vanity, but everyone wants to get there, because here one has fun, one shines, and because modern civilisation is to be found here summarised entirely by the two great social foundations, the Café de Paris and the Opera.40 Paris is read and lived at this time as a territory whose spaces are appropriately assigned to the stages and functions of life, where work and entertainment are both fundamental values. Degas belonged to this social world and urban space. It provided him with the key points of his identity, with the subject-matter of his art, and with the material for reflection which generated those ideas he considered necessary for an artist to have, and which are the meaning and why of his art. In his scenes of modern life, Degas painted not simply a social position, the bourgeoisie, but the more mobile part of it, the one to which he belonged, like the artists and the bohemians of Paris whom he knew. It is therefore possible to speak of Degas’s oeuvre as an example of ethno-geography as well as autobiography, in which the life and work of Degas coincided in a pattern of group engagements: he portrayed his own

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friends, the members of the circles he spent his evenings with. Of course, the circle of friends Degas became involved with would vary over the years, as he changed as an individual and as events of diverse nature affected his and everyone’s social life (e.g.: the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 or the Dreyfus Affair), but Degas and his art are inseparable from notions of place, circle, and sociability. Carol Armstrong has written about the pattern of group engagements to be found in Degas’s life and works, providing the examples of Degas’s family members who were merchants, and whom he depicted in Portraits in a Cotton Office, New Orleans (1873); of the circle of bankers/art patrons in Portraits at the Stock Exchange (1878); and, finally, of Degas’s link with the circle of “aristophile” Opera-goers uniting around Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac.41 Armstrong therefore has rightly inscribed the phenomenon Degas in its entirety (life and work) into its web of existences and friendships. In Odd Man Out (1991), Armstrong analysed this form of social engagement on the part of Degas within the artist’s concern with the issues of work and workers, and within his supposed view of professionalism as a form of prostitution under the cover of aesthetic concern. She linked this to Degas’s supposed search for his own position in the world and to his ambivalent attitude towards commerce. But Degas was not looking for a position in the world, as he knew since adolescence that he would be a painter in Paris. Furthermore, he did not have an ambivalent attitude toward commerce. He lived near the boulevards and he exhibited at the Salon until 1870, aware of the Parisian art system, of its rules and of its flaws and in it he was seeking recognition. A Parisian by birth, son and grandson of merchants and moneylenders, he had nothing against commerce in itself, as is evident from his letters, for example.42 Moreover, rather than just representing the artist as prostitute, as Armstrong argues, and thereby displaying disdain for his own professional status, he pointed to the amount of work required of the artist, to the toil that goes into acquiring a technique that might translate into a performance or artwork. There is no vilification in Degas’s art. His representation of workers at work (e.g.: musicians, dancers, caféconcert performers, milliners, laundresses) joins his perception that beauty in art is a result of technique conquered by means of hard work. In A Degas Sketchbook (2000), Armstrong referred more specifically to the circle comprising Degas, Halévy, Ernest Reyer and Ludovic Lepic. The sociability sketchbook on which the friends drew and the presence of portraits and caricatures of theatre and café life in the 1870s are seen by Armstrong as an allusion to the “thriving discourse on the new city” to

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which Degas contributed with his art. For her, the conception of the city expressed by Degas in his works and by Halévy’s society was the lowlife negative of their own high society, and a place for slumming, whose spectacle could be viewed with a fascinated disdain that confirmed its otherness and its viewers’ detachment from it, not to mention the observing class’s dependence on the performing class’s low society for contrast.43

This view implies an old belief that Degas was a grand bourgeois who frequented congenial elegant Parisian salons, and looked down on poor ballerinas, hat makers, singers, circus workers, and jockeys. But neither Degas nor Lepic nor Halévy was a grand bourgeois, quite the contrary. They were artists, writers, and intellectuals. Halévy and Lepic had gravitated around the elegant world during the Second Empire, a world Degas was far from. In truth, they all belonged to the same category as ballerinas, singers, jockeys, hat makers, and circus workers, all working on the perfectible artwork, all on the other side from the public. Halévy was a playwright, Reyer a music composer and later a librarian at the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, and Lepic was an etcher and a landscape and animalier painter who occasionally designed Opera costumes. They all worked in the Opera and at the image making of the Opera. Therefore, Degas’s ethno-geography is specifically limited to the observation of these Parisian workers intent on building or perpetuating a tradition that during the second half of the nineteenth century was internationally celebrated as Parisian, the Opéra. Halévy, Lepic, Degas, and Reyer were the Opéra de Paris themselves. Furthermore, to the degree that Degas is observing his own social group and its cultural values as they are lived out in the city, Degas’s work defies its own ethno-geographic scope and becomes autobiography and speculation on the lot of the modern artist as he perceived it: hard work. When dealing with Degas, therefore, from the beginning we find ourselves in the “Ville,” whose identity consists in the contiguity of business and pleasure, and more precisely we find ourselves in what urban historians have defined as the “résolument ludique” “Paris du gai savoir.”44 But Degas’s rendering of his city is not a straightforward social description; it is selective, as he reads it through a very narrow focus, concentrating on one of the many specific Parisian social worlds, a world including such workers as laundresses and maids as well as artists. Furthermore, Degas’s reflection on the artist constitutes a project of introspection, as that world is the social world Degas himself belongs to, his acquaintances and possible customers whom his subject-matter is destined to please, and

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whose pleasures, spectacles, are his own. That same subject matter could serve a higher aim, a discourse that in his case revolved around the status of the artist and his place in society. His insistence upon representing dancers, jockeys, singers, critics, painters, and other workers is such that his oeuvre can be understood, on the one hand, as a praise of the special Parisian intellectual sociability that puts the arts and the artist at the centre of its discussion and, on the other, as a lifelong reflection on the status of the artist, through the representation of work. For all his Right Bank Parisian-ness, the young Degas also lived for a number of years on the Left Bank.

4. Left Bank In 1845 Edgar started to attend the Lycée Descartes on the rue SaintJacques, the heart of the pays latin.45 That year, the Degas moved to the Left Bank. Between 1845 and 1853, frequent changes of address are documented for the family, moving from 24 rue de l’Ouest to 37 rue Cassette, and to 27 rue Madame. The banking business at 28 rue de la Victoire also occasionally provided the family with an address in between moves from apartment to apartment. Edgar had now four siblings: Achille (1838-1893), Thérèse (1840-1897), Marguerite (1842-1895), and René (1845-1926). For a relatively large family, all these moves, as Loyrette has observed, paint a picture of the instability of Auguste’s arrangements and show that Degas’s youth was certainly not as easy, quiet, and grand bourgeois, as was once believed.46 Furthermore, in 1847, Célestine died. She was only 32. Edgar’s three only extant references to his mother in his adult life include the memory of a visit to Mme Le Bas, the widow of a revolutionary guillotined during the Great Revolution, who lived in the rue Monsieur-le-Prince. Degas remembered the red floors and the portraits of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre hanging on the walls at the house of Mme Le Bas, and his mother’s comment regarding “those monsters.” The second memory was of being accompanied by Célestine to the studio of the painter Paul-Emile Destouches (1794-1874) in the rue du Bac to sit for a portrait, which still exists. Degas was a child of five or six years. The third recollection of his mother was in a scene of family life: Auguste leaving the house distractedly and ignoring Célestine who called him and indignantly tapped her fingers on the table.47 The Degas family had then moved to the Left Bank, the grim part of town, from its geographical and social extreme in the north of Paris, the Chaussée d’Antin, where Auguste continued to work. The quartier SaintJacques, “ce noir et boueux quartier, qui descend par des rues étroites vers

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la vieille île des Parisiens” stood as the opposite, “de toute sa tristesse, de toute son obscurité” to the Chaussée d’Antin, “la ville des élus,” and “brillant séjour du luxe et de l’opulence.” The connection between the two parts of town was a subtle one: the misery of the student’s life was temporary, education being the honest way to reach one day the Chaussée d’Antin, “la terre promise de toutes les ambitions qui visent au bonheur,” “le faubourg Saint-Germain du nouveau régime, avec cette différence que cet autre paradis de l’aristocratie acquise est ouvert à chacun,” where all the dreams came true of “bien-être, de vie agréable et molle, d’élégant tumulte, de riant désordre, de douceurs, d’éclat et de délices que l’imagination a pu former.” That was where everyone wanted to go, to the Chaussée d’Antin, “parce qu’on y brille, parce qu’on y jouit, parce qu’on s’y divertit, parce que la civilité matérielle de notre temps s’y trouve rassemblée tout entière, et se résume clairement par deux grandes fondations sociales, le café de Paris et l’Opéra.”48 The frequent change of address of the Degas family testifies to their unstable lifestyle. Achille was born in 1838 at 21 rue de la Victoire, where at around this time Auguste’s bank was established. In 1842 they were at 8 chaussée de la Muette, in the suburb of Passy. It may be that the Degas moved to the Left Bank in order to facilitate their children’s education. Thérèse and Marguerite attended the Sacré Coeur convent school, housed in the hôtel Biron. This was a free boarding school for girls, run by the sisters of the order of the Sacré Coeur, founded in 1800 by MadeleineSophie Barat. Edgar was enrolled at Louis-le-Grand, then called Lycée Descartes, a leading school, socially and educationally, founded as a free boarding school by the Jesuits in 1564. It passed under the patronage of Louis XIV in 1682, and until the expulsion of the Jesuits from France (1762-64), but kept dispensing the most thorough education, based on the classics, and for free, especially to boys of modest social levels. There were a few aristocrats, too, but the school was meant to provide instruction to the children of a broadly mixed bourgeois background: sons of lawyers, attorneys, notaries, court clerks, and bailiffs; of mathematicians, professors, writers and interpreters; also of postal officials. Even more frequently the college welcomed the sons of drapers, dealers in linens, and cotton and woollen merchants; grocers and grain traders; hosiers and haberdashers; jewellers, gilders, and purveyors of mineral waters; to which may be added the progeny of master tailors, cabinet makers, masons, locksmiths, bakers, and “chandlers”; in short, the offspring of the bourgeois of Paris and other cities, including men in business or in substantial agriculture.49

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The social extraction of the students had all to do with the fact that by the 1780s the school had established itself as the school of the Revolution, in the words of one historian. Called College Egalité between 1792 and 1795, it had become a foyer of radicalism and bourgeois revolution: a college of atheists and, “as a scholarship school for needy boys with limited prospects in the old society, Louis-le-Grand naturally produced men who welcomed extensive social changes.” These included Maximilien and Augustin Robespierre, and Camille Desmoulins.50 Under Napoleon it became the Lycée de Paris, then the Lycée Impérial, before acquiring the name of Collège Royal de Louis-le-Grand in 1814-48. The education provided by the collèges royaux, including Louis-le-Grand, comprised “Greek, Latin, Italian, English, German; natural and moral philosophy, chemistry, natural history, geography, writing and drawing.”51 At Louisle-Grand, as Loyrette pointed out, Degas was not a brilliant student, but he learnt to draw.52 The education received at Louis-le-Grand was not merely academic, and the students of Louis-le-Grand were often politically engaged intellectuals on the barricades. Degas’s republicanism can be traced to these student years at Louis-le-Grand, which was attended also by some of his future best friends. Among them was Ludovic Halévy (1834-1908), the son of Léon, and the future librettist for Offenbach’s operas. This was a milieu of penniless intellectuals and artists. Ludovic’s uncle Fromental, the composer of La Juive (1834), and the latter’s wife Léonie Rodriguez lived in a small house always full of witty people and of artworks and antiques. These were collected by Léonie, a passion that brought them to bankruptcy, a subject about which Delacroix, who was often a guest and whose paintings hung on those very same walls, wrote in his correspondence: How do these Halévys…these people loaded with debts and with many family obligations or vanity, have such a calm and smiling air through all their worries? They can only be happy by refusing to think and by hiding from themselves the reefs through which, often desperate and sometimes wrecked, they steer their ship.53

At the school, Degas also encountered Paul Valpinçon, Alfred Niaudet, and Henri Rouart, who were all young students during the revolutionary days of 1848 and at the moment of the coup d’état of 2 December 1851 that installed Louis Napoleon Bonaparte as Prince-President of the Second Republic. A year later, on 2 December 1852, he would proclaim himself Emperor Napoleon III. Degas, the quintessential Right-Bank painter, would come to know the Left Bank very well. Consistently with the functional urban geography of

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Paris, Degas attended two other ancient learning institutions on the Left Bank, the first being the Faculté de Droit, on the Montagne SainteGeneviève, where he spent a few months in 1853-54. Degas probably fits in with Bazin’s description of the typical indigenous Parisian student, the “enfant gaté de la vie mondaine” who was very different from the vivacious and naïve provincial student apprenticing himself to Paris, because the precocious experience of the city deprived him of the emotions and surprises of the “spectacle d’une grande ville en mouvement, avec sa multitude immense, son bruit, son éclat, ses plaisirs.” He certainly fits in with Bazin’s description of the student of law as the one whose vocation was the most undecided, uncertain and vague, as the study of law could in the end lead to any occupation.54 While his friend Paul Valpinçon went on to finish a thesis in law, Degas soon decided he definitely wanted to become a painter, and left the faculty to enter the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1855. After the first semester he did not qualify for confirmation of his place at the school. In order to become a painter, Degas would have to make his own apprenticeship and appoint his own masters. At a time when artistic freedom was a marker of political freedom, the success of an artist’s career no longer depended on the formal artistic education imparted at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Delacroix was self-taught, and Ingres himself had defined the Ecole des Beaux-Arts as an “endroit de perdition,” where one went only if it was absolutely necessary, and where one should block one’s ears and cover one’s eyes, because they taught everything there, except “la naïveté et la beauté.”55 The leader of the Realist avant-garde, Courbet, had not attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, neither had a very successful Salon painter like Ernest Meissonier. Closer to Degas, Manet never received any official art-school training. Instead, Manet spent six years in the atelier of the painter Thomas Couture, while also learning directly from the artworks he saw in the Louvre or in museums in Italy, Spain, and Holland. In this respect, Degas was possibly even more radical than Manet. We do not know how long exactly his apprenticeships under Félix Barrias and Louis Lamothe lasted.56 But they seem to have been brief, and anyhow, within his self-making process and progress as an artist, Degas learnt largely outside the official institutions of learning, following channels of taste which were then quite subterranean/subversive: he was developing a taste for the Dutch, Flemish, and above all French painting of the eighteenth century, discredited since David’s time and that were now the domain of interest of private collectors and art dealers such as Marcille père and Dr Louis La Caze, or the bohemian prince Grégoire Soutzo, an acquaintance of Auguste, a collector and artist, living in the rue Madame.

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Degas recalled, in his later years, that on Sundays his father used to pick him up from the Lycée to take him to the Louvre, or to visit Marcille or La Caze, or both. They were amateur painters and collectors, and received visitors in their flats. Both Marcille and La Caze, who were friends, collected eighteenth-century French, Dutch, and Flemish art, a taste for realism that was then progressive and unofficial. Within the national tradition, this realist strain was perceived as more French than the puffed-up styles of the neo-classical or romantic schools. Marcille, who lived in the rue de Tournon, was one of the first collectors who tried to rescue from oblivion the works of the “école nationale” of the eighteenth century. At Marcille’s, Degas and his father could see a few sketches by the Flemings Rubens and Franchoys, portraits by Tintoretto and Velázquez, and, most of all, they could see numerous drawings and miniatures by Proud’hon, but also by Watteau, Fragonard, Greuze; pastels by La Tour, Nanteuil and Reynolds; small paintings by Proud’hon, stilllifes by Chardin, Boucher, Greuze, Largillière, Philippe de Champaigne, Hubert Robert, and others.57 At La Caze’s (who received first at 34 rue des Mathurins, then, from 1851, at 18 rue du Cherche-Midi) Degas and his father saw an exceptional collection of eighteenth-century painting. Displayed everywhere on the walls and amassed on the floors of La Caze’s house, they saw Lancret and Pater’s depictions of actors and actresses, Fragonard’s nymphs and bathers (“sa touche rapide et fougueuse, sa couleur pétillante”), Boucher, Chardin, Bourdon, Rigaud, Le Nain, Nattier, Largillière and others. Among the works by Watteau owned by La Caze, visitors could see La Finette, L’Heureuse Chute, Une Réunion de Seigneurs dans un Parc, “petites figures finement touchées et d’une jolie couleur,” as Horsin Déon defined them. And then Gilles, La Caze’s own favourite painting: he imagined Gilles coming to life in his salon, such was the “puissance magique de la vérité dans la couleur, de la vigueur du ton et du modelé.” The Flemish and Dutch schools were represented, among others, by Rubens, Van Dyck, Ostade, Steen, Hals, Teniers, Bruegel, Hondekoeter and Rembrandt van Rijn.58 By the time Dr. La Caze’s collection entered the Louvre in 1869, following his bequest, and the Salle La Caze was inaugurated there by Napoleon III and Eugénie, in March 1870, genre painting of the eighteenth-century had emerged as a legitimately French tradition of painting, although it was still ridiculed and caricatured in the press.59 With the defeat of France in September 1870, for republican painters like Degas, striving to become the modern French masters of genre painting and working with these sources became an issue of identity. The Left Bank had always been the world of printers and painters-engravers, where for centuries, along the rue Saint-Jacques, its

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side streets, and the quais of the Seine, the “petit monde de l’image” came to life in the production and commerce of prints.60 In Degas’s youth, it was still so. The figure of the painter-engraver, and its greatest representative, Rembrandt, were in full underground revival and were the subject of a cult on the part of avant-garde artists, a cult to which Degas would promptly adhere, as we will see. Degas eventually returned to the Right Bank, finding that its values were not only his family’s, but his own, and that ninth-arrondissement subject-matter was going to be his material as a painter. He clearly stated this sense of belonging, when, later in life, Degas said to Auguste Renoir speaking of Henri Fantin-Latour’s art: “Fantin’s work is very good. What a pity it is always a little rive gauche!” In his late years, Renoir reported Degas’s words during his conversations with Ambroise Vollard.61 Recalling the facts of his own life as an artist, Renoir used Degas’s words to explain his own decision, back in 1873, to move from his atelier on the Left Bank, in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, to the Right Bank. That year, Renoir explained to Vollard, two important events had changed his life. Firstly, Renoir had met the art dealer Durand-Ruel, the first and, for a long time to come, only dealer to ever believe in his painting. Secondly, he had rented an atelier on the rue Saint-Georges, on the Right Bank, “with the feeling of having made it.” He liked the district and would never leave the Right Bank until his move to the south of France many years later. In his narrative, Renoir did not establish an explicit connection between the meeting with Durand-Ruel and his move to new lodgings close to the dealer’s shop. He said, instead, that, despite the memories that attached him to the Left Bank, he “instinctively perceived the danger of letting his painting be impregnated with that special atmosphere so aptly described by Degas” in his smart remark on Fantin-Latour.62 Degas’s perception of Fantin-Latour was not outlandish, though. Théodore Duret, speaking of the friendship between Manet and Fantin-Latour, initiated while copying the Venetians at the Louvre in 1857, wrote: “Manet was full of life and spirits, a man of impulsive temperament; Fantin-Latour, on the other hand, was introspective, dreamy, melancholy.”63 How was Degas’s definition meant to summarise Fantin-Latour’s painting and what did that definition say about the city as lived in and perceived by Degas? It is known, and Degas knew, that Fantin-Latour had been poor and often depressed in his Left Bank studio in the rue Ferou during the late 1850s, when, as a member of the Société des Trois, he shared his interests in German philosophy and music with Alphonse Legros and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Fantin-Latour, on his return from a trip to England to visit Whistler, did move to the Right Bank in 1861, finding a studio in the

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rue Saint-Lazare. Therefore, and this is what matters to our perspective on Degas and his city, Degas must have been associating the “spiritual content” of Fantin-Latour’s painting with the Quartier Latin, so creating a psycho-geographic association.64 His own memories of the grim all-male life as an intern student at Louis-le-Grand probably had a part in it, and resonates in his other cruel comment on Fantin-Latour’s arrangements of flowers against typically dark backgrounds: “Hasn’t he ever seen any against women’s corsets, then?”65 The gloomy, dark colours, and the lack of brilliance of Fantin-Latour’s portraits and still lives made palpable for Degas and Renoir a “Left-Bank atmosphere,” evoking a supposedly modest and harsh intellectual existence in that old part of town at the opposite of the active individualism, cosmopolitanism, and ostentatious affluence of boulevard culture among which he lived and that he celebrated in his art. 66 In 1852, the now motherless Degas family returned to the Right Bank, settling at 4 rue de Mondovi, near Place de la Concorde. The modest apartment was on the fourth floor. Auguste never had the means of a grand bourgeois. He never owned an apartment in Paris and was always a tenant in modest lodgings. His son Edgar, likewise, would always live in rented rooms. In his unpretentious apartment, however, Auguste held evenings of music and conversation, inviting singers and musicians to perform, as was the custom among the higher classes. These gatherings were worlds away from the solemn aristocratic or bourgeois salons studied by historian Anne-Martin Fugier.67 Nevertheless, Auguste epitomised the Parisian bourgeois practising the modern sociability that, regardless of class, gender, and political affiliation, was such an essential aspect of the modern Parisian urban existence and experience. Sociability was developed in the salons, passages, arcades, cafés, restaurants and pleasure gardens of nineteenth-century Paris to an extent unknown to other cultures.68 In the same apartment in the rue de Mondovi, according to Lemoisne, Auguste let Edgar convert a back room into his first studio, where he painted a still life, Coin d’atelier. It was in the kitchen of the apartment at rue de Mondovi that Soutzo taught Degas etching. A landscape painter and collector of prints of the northern schools, especially by Dürer, Goltzius, Van Ostade, Rembrandt and Van Dyck, Soutzo had lived in Greece and in Switzerland before coming to Paris, where he lived modestly on the rue Madame passing for an impoverished Rumanian prince. While Degas enthusiastically recorded his conversations with Soutzo in his notebooks, as on 18 January 1856 and a month later, when he also copied one of Soutzo’s landscapes, his father Auguste did not think the prince was a good artist and feared his influence on his son’s artistic

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development. In 1858, Auguste wrote to Edgar in Italy that while Soutzo was impatient to see what Edgar was doing, Soutzo himself, despite his good advice, “est toujours dans le vague et dans le vieux, et dans ce rapport il est un homme dangereux.” Degas’s closeness to Soutzo at the beginning of his career as a painter already encountered the hostility of his father and this is one of the elements that help us see clearly how Degas’s fame as a classicist is rather equivocal. Degas’s interest in the Northern painters of the Golden Age was already developed in the early 1850s, and it is inadequate to inscribe his career as having begun under the exclusive sign of Ingres. This commonplace of Degas literature is a reading incited by the anecdotal nature of Degas’s biography. In reality, the young Degas, driven by a resolute will to learn, had to see as much art as possible and in order to achieve this knowledge necessary to advancing his career, he couldn’t have relinquished the study of the Italian Renaissance, nor that of the French poussinistes nor that of living masters such as Ingres, Delacroix, and Courbet.

5. Self-portraits Though Degas had begun to draw at Louis-le-Grand, his artistic training proper began after his baccalauréat, in March 1853. Presenting himself as a pupil of Félix-Joseph Barrias, who had a studio at 37 rue de l’Entrepôt-des-Marais, Degas enrolled as a copyist at the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Impériale. In old age, Degas reminisced with Lemoisne about his first meetings with Achille Devéria, “a romantic figure, draped in a black cape,” who was then curator at the Cabinet des Estampes. There the young Degas, seeking “a more intimate communion with the soul of the Old Masters,” was struck by the work of the paintersengravers: Mantegna, Dürer, Goya, and Rembrandt.69 Lemoisne’s language is so evocative that it obscures the fact that the young Degas couldn’t have been but struck by the Cabinet des Estampes: copying from Old Masters prints conserved in what was one of the richest collections of its kind in the world was an illuminating experience that had an essential role in the training and definition of any self-respecting artist. On the walls of the two “narrow and sordid” rooms of the Cabinet des Estampes Degas could see permanently displayed the best work of the so-called paintersengravers, such as Mantegna, Dürer, Claude Lorrain, Goya, and he could study portfolios. The Cabinet des Estampes was open twice a week to all manner of visitors, while art historians, critics, bibliophiles, and architects and, naturally, artists could register in order to access the Cabinet every day. 70

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Degas also registered to copy at the Louvre. This does not indicate a portentous communion or affinity of Degas with the masters that were then represented in the Louvre, as some writers have suggested. Copying at the Louvre was a natural and essential exercise for any Parisian artist who seriously wanted to build up skills. Degas first worked from Franciabigio’s Portrait of a Man and then copied a Portrait of Young Man then believed to be a self-portrait by Raphael, whose works were among the most copied in the Louvre in these years, along with those of Titian, those of the Spanish painter Murillo, and Prud’hon for the French school. In 1855 Degas was also training under a new teacher, Louis Lamothe (1822-1869), who had come to Paris from Lyons and kept an atelier at his house at 10 rue du Regard, near the Luxembourg gardens. Lamothe, who knew by heart Ingres’s maxims, often exhibited at the Salon. In 1846-49, Lamothe had worked as an assistant to Hyppolite Flandrin, who was working at the frescoes in the church of Saint-Paul in Nîmes, and had also assisted him in 1848-53 at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, in Paris. They were among the most successful representatives of the Christian revival and specialised in mural painting.71 They both hailed from Lyon, a notably pious city with a tradition of mysticism, and that was in mid-nineteenthcentury France a leading centre of religious thinking, philosophy, and spirituality, as well as an important centre of pre-Raphaelitism. A community of painters united by their Christian faith worked there, including the Flandrin brothers, Janmot, and Chenavard.72 Auguste did not particularly like Lamothe, neither did Edgar, who would soon declare Lamothe “more idiotic than ever.” But they had different motivations for not being overly enthusiastic about the teacher. Auguste, in his craze for the Primitives, thought that, for all their mastery of drawing, Ingres and his followers, including Flandrin and Lamothe, remained weak artists in comparison to the real masters, the Florentines of the early Renaissance. Yet they were the closest you could come to those Italian masters of purity, and Auguste had to settle for that. As for Edgar, yet to disparage Lamothe, he was on a learning journey with his teacher, and in the summer months of 1855 he followed him to Lyon, where Lamothe and J. B. Ponce were assisting Flandrin working at the frescoes in the church of Saint-Martin-d’Ainay, completed in October 1855.73 Degas studied at the local museum, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and at the local churches, where sketches and notes taken in notebooks from this trip give a chance to observe that the Catholic faith was a relevant aspect of Degas’s life. Before returning to Paris, he travelled to Provence, where he sketched from the Roman ruins as well as from the churches and in the museums.

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In these years of eclectic apprenticeship, Degas executed numerous self-portraits, showing increasing mastery and self-confidence.74 Compared, for instance, to the fact that Manet painted only one selfportrait in all his life (in 1878-79, and left it unfinished), Degas’s selfportraits of his early years indicate not just the convenience of being his own readily available model, but an absorption in self-portraiture as a form of self-knowledge and exploration of one’s image. This quality did not escape Degas’s most dedicated biographers: in 1931, Marcel Guérin published Dix-neuf portraits de Degas par lui-même. The preface was written by Lemoisne, who used the old Degas’s own remembering of his beginnings, and Degas’s early self-portraits, made in a variety of media between 1854 and 1868, to put forward the myth of Degas as an aristocrat. This text is exemplary of the self-fashioning myth of the artist. This is a genre proper of the history of art, as Soussloff has shown: it is an enterprise at once autobiographic and biographic, in which artists and art historians consciously and unconsciously collaborate in fashioning the artist’s “mythic cultural figure.”75 In Dix-Neuf Portraits de Degas par lui-même, Degas’s early selfportraits make one story with his biography by Lemoisne, which follows such characteristic topoi of the genre as have been perpetuated since Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. In his life of Degas, Lemoisne developed all the commonplaces of the genre of the mythic artist’s life: the aristocratic origin of the artist;76 the artist being his own model in his “true” and “sincere” self-portraits, in which the gravity of “cette figure sérieuse (n’oublions pas que Degas travaille et que pour lui le travail est chose très sérieuse)” seems to be “illumineé de vie extérieure.”77 Finally, leading to the third topos of the artist whose only masters are the Masters, Lemoisne introduced the other commonplace in the literature about Degas: his cult of Ingres and the role that he and his follower Lamothe had in the formation of the classicist Degas.78 This was both a projection of the nostalgic ideas held by the aged Degas, in this case his ingrisme of the 1890s, and a manifestation of the times in which writings about Degas began to be published. Lemoisne, writing in times of retour à l’ordre, restored Degas’s art to classical values such as linearity in drawing, formal severity, and monumentality, a teaching which Degas must have found in the Masters of the Louvre, at the Cabinet des Estampes, but most of all in Italy. In Rome, Naples and Florence, Lemoisne wrote, Quelle meilleure introduction à sa vie d’artiste pouvait-il trouver que les œuvres italiennes du Moyen Age ou de la Renaissance ? Le souvenir qu’il conservait à la fin de sa vie, de ses premières découvertes, témoigne assez de l’impression ineffaçable qu’elles laissèrent en son esprit.

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The deep influence of the Masters on Degas was visible for Lemoisne in the early self-portraits. In these, the “dessin précis, poétisé par la vérité, cette facture serrée, unie, consciencieuse mais rendant si bien la lumiére, la vie concentrée d’un regard ou d’une expression fugitive” made it clear that to the Italian masters Degas owed the “partie solide” on which his personality would develop. What Degas was looking for “dans les œuvres de Giotto, dans celles des grands Florentins du XVe siècle ou dans les portraits français et allemands du XVIe siècle c’était le sentiment de vie intense qui s’en dégage.” In this 1930s reconstruction of Degas’s beginnings as classical and all focused on drawing, one of the selfportraits that Degas executed in the Courbet-style is treated by Guérin as romantic and dramatic, something which was “très rare chez Degas” and dismissed so: “Est-ce une recherché voulue? Est-ce simplement le reflet inconscient de préoccupations, de souffrances, ou de soucis du moment ? Nous ne connaissons pas la vie intime de Degas et il est impossible de faire même des conjectures ou des suppositions.”79 Lemoisne, guided by Degas, provided the self-portraits with the terms of the artist’s existence and destiny which would inform subsequent writing of Degas’s life and work: the aristocratic origins, the artist being his own model in a project of “véracité” and “sincerité” of his selfportraits; the Masters being his only masters. In this mythical and anecdotal biography, Degas’s brief encounter with Ingres in 1855 has a pivotal role. Degas himself, decades after the fact, turned this episode into a founding event of his artistic career. In October 1905, Valéry heard from Degas how sometime before the opening of the Paris Exposition Universelle, the young artist had called on Edouard Valpinçon, an acquaintance and more probably a client of Auguste, and father of Paul, one of Degas’s school-mates at Louis-le-Grand. The banker and collector was annoyed, as he had felt compelled to refuse to lend Ingres the Baigneuse he owned and which the artist needed for the exhibition of his works. Valpinçon feared dangers for the canvas, but Degas convinced Valpinçon to lend Ingres the painting and the collector brought Degas along to Ingres’s atelier on the quai Voltaire, to announce his change of mind. At the atelier, Degas saw paintings and drawings, some of which he would one day own himself. On the way out, Ingres fainted on the doorstep. He was bleeding and Degas helped him recover, washed his face and then went to seek Madame Ingres, rue de Lille, to walk her to the atelier. The following day, Degas went back to Madame Ingres, to enquire about the master’s health, and on the occasion he was shown a painting. Later, Valpinçon sent Degas back to Ingres to ask for the lent painting to

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be returned,, and this timee Degas unbu urdened himseelf and told th he master that he him mself was a painter at his beginnings , and that his father, “homme de goût et amateeur,” did not th hink his case aabsolutely dessperate. Ingres’s advice was: “Faites des lignes…Beau aucoup de lig gnes, soit d’après le souvenir, soiit d’après natture.” On thee following visit v with Valpinçon, D Degas showedd Ingres a porrtfolio of skettches, on which Ingres commented:: “C’est bon! Jeune hommee, jamais d’apprès la nature. Toujours d’après le soouvenir et les gravures des maîtres.” m Deggas recalled th he episode only in his old age, enriching and maagnifying its importance during d the years of his ingrisme in the t 1880s and d 1890s. Degaas then collectted works by Ingres ffor his collecction/museum project, in w which his ow wn works would havee figured am mong those of o the artistss that he co onsidered representativve of nineteennth-century French F paintinng, another in nstance of the autobioographical entterprise Degaas was intennt upon. Furtthermore, Degas’s rem miniscence off his encounteer with Ingress and, most of o all, the suggestion w with which thhe latter woulld have proviided the budd ding artist (“draw liness, young mann, lots of liness”) shows all its anecdotal and selfcelebrative vvalue: the enccounter of the old master w with the young g one and the old mastter suggestingg that the youn ng draw lines are “the comm monplace rehearsed iin conversation between painters,” aas Martha Ward W has written.80 H Historians of Degas D have en ndlessly repeaated the episo ode in the classic form m given by Deegas himself, and this aneccdote remainss integral with the view w of Degas ass an ingriste.811

Fig.1-3 Self lf-Portrait with Charcoal, 1855, oil onn canvas, cm, 81 x 64, Musée d’Orrsay, Paris.

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Degas’s juvenile devotion to Ingres, however, should not be overemphasised. Besides being a budding artist naturally willing to learn how to draw, Degas was simply being au courant. It is true that at the Exposition Universelle Degas made copies in his sketchbooks of Ingres’s works only, but this instance must be seen in a wider context: in 1855 Degas could not have disregarded Ingres, considering that in those months Degas was a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and a pupil of Lamothe, who revered Ingres, and that at Palais des Beaux-Arts, in the Universal Exhibition, Ingres was one of the three painters who were given the most prominent display in the French pavilion, with Delacroix and Decamps.82 Another good reason for Degas not to disregard Ingres was that the latter had his own oppositional and modern side as an artist: he was not a conventionally academic draughtsman, but a highly idiosyncratic artist, a genial individualist who had been heavily criticised in his beginnings for the “bizarrerie” of his paintings, rather than their “beauté réelle.”83 Ingres, furthermore, did not exhibit at the Salon, preferring to have his own private exhibitions at his atelier.84 Furthermore, although we have to guess that Degas saw not just the eleven works by Courbet hung in the French pavilion, but also visited Courbet’s Pavillon du Réalisme on the Place de l’Alma, it is clear in Degas’s works of 1855 that forces other than Ingres were guiding him. In the spring of 1855, Degas was working at his SelfPortrait with Charcoal (Fig. 1-3), where he presents himself as the Parisian artist of the Realist avant-garde, a follower of Courbet and Rembrandt, an artist “on the way from Holland,” as he later recalled, rather than from Italy.85 Painted in the tradition of the self-portrait executed with a mirror, in his half-length self-portrait of 1855, Degas appears dressed in the black suit of the Parisian bourgeois against an undistinguished dark background. The self-portrait might have been executed during Degas’s only term as a student at the Ecole des BeauxArts, as he is holding a charcoal and resting his left hand on a portfolio. The importance of the work lies in the fact that it records less the way the artist is than the way the artist wishes to be remembered.86 In 1855 Degas announced himself as the modern Parisian self-made artist: holding a charcoal over his portfolio, but in a Baudelairean black suit and against the unspecific background which, as has been written, is indication of “a careful, fully aware autobiographical attention.”87 While it is certain that Degas had in mind Ingres’s Self-portrait at Chantilly, he departed from that model and made a very precise statement by choosing not to portray himself as an artist at work, as Ingres did, but as an urbane bourgeois of Second Empire Paris, a modern artist wearing his identity, one associated with democracy and claims for freedom, a follower of Courbet,

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Rembrandt and arguably of a modern Ingres. In one of his many selfportraits, the Self-Portrait at 34, Rembrandt had portrayed himself not as an artist at work, but as a gentleman of leisure, wearing a velvet and fur costume of another century. The self-portrait was an allusion to Titian’s Portrait of a Man once believed to be a Portrait of Ariosto, and to Raphael’s Baldassarre Castiglione, “two different kinds of gentlemen” in a process of Renaissance self-fashioning defined by Perry Chapman as “the attitude that viewed the formation of the self as an artful, conscious process.”88 Degas borrowed from Rembrandt not just the notion of the artist/gentleman, but also the motif of the hand holding the charcoal and the motif of the arm leaning on a surface, seen in the 1639 Self-Portrait Leaning on a Stone Sill. In Rembrandt’s images, the artist was leaning on a stone sill, for which Degas substituted a portfolio, just as Courbet had done in the self-portrait of 1846, his own homage to Rembrandt, which most probably Degas saw at the Pavillon du Réalisme, while he was at work on his own self-portrait. Degas’s self-portrait mirrors that self-portrait’s self-reflective quality and provides us with Degas’s own view of himself as a gentleman and confident art student whose cult of Ingres was not an exclusive one, as Reff noted.89 Degas acknowledged other masters among the Realist avantgarde. The interest Degas took in his person makes one think immediately of Rembrandt, the artist whom, in the middle of the querelle du réalisme, the avant-garde had chosen as an inspiring model of artist free in both his work and life arrangements.90 In mapping Degas in this chapter I have described Degas’s Parisianness and his artistic beginnings in Paris, while also showing how Degas’s biography and his first steps as a modern artist engaged in self-learning in Paris are intertwined in the literature with the myth of the artist. In the next chapter, I will look at the years Degas spent in Italy, where he was pursuing an apprenticeship at the sources of art without which his artistic education would have been incomplete.

Notes 1

See Romane-Musculus, 1983. See Goulon Sigwalt, 1988. 3 Valéry, 1965, pp. 63-5. A slightly different version of the story was told by Degas to Paul-André Lemoisne, who mentioned that René-Hilaire dealt in grain, but gave as the reason for his escaping the guillotine his failed attempts to save his fiancée, “jeune royaliste qui fut guillotinée (jamais plus tard il ne voulut traverser la place de la Concorde)”: Lemoisne, 1946, vol. I, p. 7. All the versions of René2

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Hilaire’s escape from the Terror rehearse two motifs of émigré literature formulated by François-René de Chateaubriand in his Mémoires d’outre tombe (1841). The episode of the fourteen “jeunes filles de Verdun,” sent to the guillotine all together was for Chateaubriand one of the most atrocious massacres of the Terror: Chateaubriand, 1948, I, p. 415. Elsewhere in his Mémoires, Chateubriand recalled his return to Paris from exile in England, in the spring of 1800, and the anguish that took him, and made him cross in haste the Place de la Concorde. The scene of so many murders had now “l’air mélancolique et abandonné d’un vieil amphithéâtre; on y passait vite; j’étais tout surpris de ne pas y entendre des plaintes; je craignais de mettre le pied dans un sang dont il ne restait aucune trace; mes yeux ne se pouvaient détacher de l’endroit du ciel où s’était élevé l’instrument de mort;”: Chateaubriand, 1948, II, pp. 13-14. 4 See on this Mathiez, 1927, especially pp. 242-57. Also see Abbad, 2002. 5 See for instance on merchant banking in Paris during the Revolution: Cope, 1983, pp. 17-31. 6 As we have seen this was a topos of émigré literature. 7 Taylor, 1961-62. 8 See Bergeron, p. 292. 9 See on Napoleonic war economy: “The capital market during revolutions, war, and peace” in Neal, 1990, pp. 180-200. 10 See Davis, 1981. 11 Jones, 2002, p. 578. 12 In old age Degas nostalgically identified French-ness with Catholicism. Not only did he go to Lourdes, a pilgrimage destination for miracle-seekers, we also find that his ardently French and Catholic patriotism preoccupied him in his symbolist meditations on art. According to Valéry, Degas said of Delacroix’s Saint-Louis Winning the Battle of Taillebourg that “Le bleu du manteau de Saint-Louis, c’est la France!!”: Valéry, 1965, p. 166-68. 13 Valéry, 1965, pp. 51-4 and pp. 119-25. 14 Halévy, 1966, pp. 41-3. See Bowness, 1978 for the friendship between Proudhon and Courbet, who portrayed the philosopher and his family (Musée du Petit Palais, Paris). 15 In Lemoisne’s intentions there may be echoes of the Artistocracy of Action d’Art: see Antliff, 1998. 16 Jones, 1983, p. 88. 17 See on this: Reff, 2011. 18 See Derré, 1962. 19 See on the origins of Romanticism in France: Bénichou, 1973 and Bénichou, 1988. 20 Marrinan, 2009, p. 157. Historicism as the official style during the reign of Louis Philippe was institutionalised through the creation in 1837 of the Commission des Monuments Historiques. Overseen by the Ministry of Interior and with Prosper Mérimée as its Inspector General until 1852, the mission of the office was the classification, restoration, and protection of the monuments of France in view of their preservation as documents and monuments of national history.

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21 Marrinan, 2009, p. 193, relying on Loyer, 1988, especially pp. 91-6. Also see Papayanis, 2004 on Parisian urban planning in the first half of the nineteenth century. 22 Delécluze, 1983, p. 392. 23 See on the historicist re-writing of cultural landscape of Romantic Paris under Louis-Philippe: Marrinan, 2009, especially Chapter 3, pp. 66-132 and Chapter 4, pp. 133-61. 24 It has been written that “Those with money to lend are, by long force of habit, tradition, and more especially the needs and desires of borrowers, accorded a special measure of deference in daily routine. This is readily transmuted by the recipient into an assurance of personal mental superiority. Treated that way, I must be wise. In consequence, self-scrutiny-the greatest support to minimal good senseis at risk.”: Galbraith, 1993, p. 16. 25 See Rewald, 1946. 26 See Reff, 2011. 27 See on this Reff, 2011. 28 See Tulard, 1987, pp. 1622-24 and Robiquet, 1942 on the role of theatre in the society of the Napoleonic years. 29 See Pinon, 1991, pp. 168-69. 30 Hillairet, 1963, p. 313. 31 See Morel, 1988. 32 The Palais Royal had been the centre of Parisian life since the years of the reign of Louis XIII, when the Prime Minister, Richelieu, acquired the hôtel de Rambouillet, which then stood in the place of the Palais Royal. The establishment of Richelieu at the heart of Paris was the direct emanation of his “volonté de se placer au nombre et au-dessous des grandes familles du royaume.” The quartier became a privileged area of residence for government officials, turning this part of Paris into the political engine of the country. Thanks to Richelieu the Palais Cardinal, as the Palais Royal was originally called, and its surroundings, came to monumentalise, in the very heart of the city, the convergence of the political and the artistic at the core of Parisian life. Richelieu’s palace grew in size and luxury accordingly with his ascendance and political power, housing his library and sumptuous collection of furniture, art, rugs and objets d’art. The Palais also had its Chambre du Conseil, a chapel and a salle de Comédie reserved for the Italian actors whom Richelieu favoured. The ground floors of the edifice consisted in arcades and gardens, tended by royal gardeners, and Richelieu’s most cherished part of the construction. Richelieu also created the Imprimerie Royale (1631) and the Académie Française (1635), while his idea for the creation of an Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture would be realized by Louis XIV in 1648. See Palais Royal, 1988, pp. 11-19 and p. 46. 33

Palais Royal, 1988, pp. 117- 8. Palais Royal, 1988, p. 65. 35 Palais Royal, 1988, p. 99. 36 Quoted in Palais Royal, 1988, p.102. 34

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Simond, 1900, tome II, 1830-1870, pp. 330-34. Simond, 1900, pp. 3-12. 39 Bazin, 1832. 40 Bazin, 1832. 41 See Armstrong, 1991, p. 42 In these, he repeats the words of praise he had for the commercial enterprises of his brothers, or for the commercial success of some of his friends, painters such as Tissot, Stevens, and Moreau: see Degas, 1947. 43 Armstrong, 2000, pp. 34-5. 44 In the “Paris savant”, the “résolument ludique” ninth arrondissement stands out as a district of finance and politics, theatre and music but also of learning (the presence of the Conservatory) and scientific discoveries- such as the marriage of learning and science realised by the invention of the cinema. The ninth arrondissement was in fact “the cradle of cinematography,” as in 1895 the Lumière brothers projected the first movie in a salon of the Grand Café on the boulevard des Capucines: Alter and Testard-Vaillant, 1997, p. 265. 45 Bazin, 1832. 46 Loyrette, 1991, p. 20. 47 See Valéry 1965, p. 63. 48 Bazin, 1832 49 Palmer, 1975, pp. 46-47. 50 See Palmer, 1975, p. 32, and see pp. 9-38 and pp. 169-72. 51 Paris 1827, pp. 286-89. 52 Loyrette, 1991, p. 29. 53 Delacroix, Letters, 1880, II, p. 410, quoted in Curtiss, 1953. 54 Bazin, 1832. 55 Amaury-Duval, 1878, p. 94. 56 See Lemoisne, 1946, I, particularly pp. 1-15. 57 See Déon, 1862. 58 See Déon, 1860 and Béguin, 1969. 59 See Faroult, 2005, pp. 330-31. 60 Courboin, 1914, p. 2. 61 Vollard, 2002, p. 68. 62 Vollard, 1995, pp. 169-70. 63 Duret, 1910, p. 49. 64 Anderson & Koval, 1994, p.105. 65 Lemoisne, 1946, I, p. 144. 66 Artists and students had a very intense social life on the Left Bank, with theatre, political protest, “les guinguettes, les cafés, les bals masqués, les amours sans lendemain, passe-temps vulgaires, qu’ils partagent avec la jeunesse de tous les états, artistes, commis, artisans, courtauds.” : Bazin, 1832. The Left Bank was not simply different from the Right Bank; it was, indeed, mentally perceived as such, as an “exotic territory,” whose atmosphere was “sleepy and provincial” and whose specific traits were the sadness, poverty and grey-ness of the tall, old houses lining the rue Saint-Jacques-all clichés recurring in the literature: Caron, 1991, p.119. 38

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See for instance: Fugier, 1990 and Fugier, 2003. See Marrinan, 2009, pp. 271-320, and especially pp. 300-3. 69 Lemoisne, 1946, vol. I, pp. 9-10. 70 Duchesne ainé, 1855 and Lethève, 1968. 71 On Lamothe see Delaborde, 1865; Aubrun, 1983 and Flandrin, 1984, pp. 52-3 and 95-123. 72 See Jullian, 1937. 73 See Flandrin, 1984, pp. 155-61. 74 Lemoisne, II: n. 2-5; 11-14; 31-32; 37; 51; 103-5. 75 See Soussloff, 2005, pp. 3-17. 76 Lemoisne never mentioned Auguste’s financial troubles, writing only that he was a banker, a “mélomane distingué et amateur de peinture; le dimanche il emmenait souvent son fils Edgar au musée où il se plaisait à lui montrer les œuvres des grands peintres.” To fit such honourable pursuits, Lemoisne produced the image of a Degas aristocrat malgré lui: “Le véritable nom de famille est de Gas. C’est ainsi que Degas signa ses tous premiers dessins. Bientôt après il réunit ces deux mots en un seul et signa toutes ses œuvres: Degas. Cependant ses frères, et notamment son frère René, continuèrent à s’appeler de Gas, avec la particule à laquelle ils avaient droit.”: Guérin, 1931, n. p. Lemoisne was not inventing this aristocracy all by himself. According to Henri Loyrette, it was in the 1860-70s, that Edgar’s brother Achille, affected by the current Parisian particulomanie, bought a bogus title of nobility with a coat of arms: Loyrette, 1991, p. 10. But it was Lemoisne who resurrected it decades later to suit the biography of the painter whom he wanted “noble” beyond all metaphor. 77 “Aussi, durant plusieurs années, fut-il lui-même son modèle préféré, toujours prêt, toujours complaisant. Oubliant sans doute bien vite quels étaient les traits que lui renvoyait le miroir, il étudiait avec ferveur ce visage un peu sévère malgré les yeux ardents, cherchant à en exprimer les caractéristiques, recommençant sans jamais se lasser afin de mieux rendre la structure du masque, les reliefs des traits, les jeux de la lumière, l’expression de la physionomie.”: Guérin, 1931, n. p. 78 Lemoisne wrote: “Il avait la chance d’être alors guidé par deux hommes qui eurent la meilleure influence sur lui : Lamothe, élève d’Ingres, peintre secondaire mais excellent technicien, qui lui inculqua le culte du maître montalbanais et lui apprit à chercher la pureté du dessin; puis un ami de sa famille, le prince Grégoire Soutzo, peintre, graveur et amateur de goût, qui lui enseigna l’eau-forte et surtout développa le côté intellectuel de son art.” : Guérin, 1931, n. p. 79 Guérin, 1931, n. p. The self-portrait in question is: essence on paper on canvas, cm 53 x 36,5, Paris. 80 Ward, 1996, p. 40. See for example Camille Pissarro’s frequent suggestions in his letters to his son Lucien living in London and learning to become an artist: “draw often and consult the primitives”: Pissarro, 1943, p. 24. Also see pp. 37-40 and p. 49. 81 The Degas literature has not been equally stimulated by other emblematic moments in the artist’s self-fashioning account of his youth: the aged Degas liked to remember his glimpse of the elegant Delacroix, wearing his scarf, crossing the 68

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rue Mazarine near the rue des Beaux-Arts, the evocation of a mythical figure in a juvenile geography, or seeing Pierre-Joseph Proudhon on the quai Malaquais. 82 See Paris, 1855. 83 Amaury-Duval, 1878, p. 7. 84 Degas visited one of Ingres’s exhibitions in 1864: Valéry, 1965, p. 76. We have a description of Ingres’s atelier by Champfleury, who reviewed on 5 December 1848 an Exposition intime à l’Atelier de M. Ingres. A fervent supporter of Gustave Courbet and no admirer of Ingres’s art, Champfleury wasn’t going to regret the imminent closing of the show, already announced by the “inscription fatale”: “On ne montre plus les tableaux,” scribbled with chalk on the atelier door: “J’ai vu le dernier jour de cette exposition-chapelle et je ne l’oublierais guère que si j’entendais les trompettes du jugement dernier. Dire que c’est de ce logement enfumé, triste, terne et gris, qu’est sortie la réputation européenne de M. Ingres, les admirateurs du contour pur ne le croiront pas. Ce qu’il faut voir, chose bizarre, ce sont les dieux lares de plâtre qui encombrent la maison. Faunes, Hercule, Bacchus, Apollon, Jupiter, ils protègent de leur souvenir mythologique la gloire non moins fabuleuse de l’adorateur de la ligne.” Champfleury saw Ingres’ art as “l’exacte imitation du détail mal placé,” cold and ferocious : “cet art méthodique, cruel, barbare” close to “la sculpture coloriée, la sculpture habillée, les figures de cire." He had the same impression of lifeless-ness from Ingres’s studio, which he described as a funereal chapel with its “dieux de plâtre protecteurs de l’atelier," plaster casts of gods which anyone would throw away from the sixth floor with no regrets, but which Ingres treasured like diamonds, protecting each of them from dust with a little roof made of newspaper-the Journal des Débats, each issue of which featured a feuilleton by the former pupil of David, Etienne-Jean Delécluze. Champfleury concluded with the consideration that all of Ingres’s life and work were summarised by the simple fact that stationers sold a kind of drawing paper, papier Ingres, which was grey: Champfleury, 1973, pp. 133-35. 85 Degas, 1947. 86 As Anthony Bond has written, “The commonly held view “that any portrait should attempt to reveal the true character and the complex identity that lies behind the appearance of the sitter” is “always a problematic assumption,” because “being human, artists may wish to present the image they want us to have of them, or indeed to create the ideal to which they aspire.”: in Bond & Woodall, 2005, p. 31. 87 Bond and Woodall, 2005, p. 51. 88 Chapman, 1990, p. 73. Also see White and Buvelot, 1999. 89 Reff, 1976 b, I, p. 13. 90 See Doesschate-Chu, 1975 and McQueen, 2003.

CHAPTER TWO ITALY

1. What Degas found in Italy Degas spent the years between July 1856 and March 1859 travelling in Italy. It was not the first time he had visited the country where his father had been born. This time Degas would travel alone for nearly three years, in what must have been intended, Loyrette has written, as a Grand Tour motivated by his need to study Italian art more than by the family ties that linked him to Italy.1 The French scholar has also argued that what Degas learnt from his Italian sojourn was actually, in its content, more French and Parisian than Italian. From his Italian tour, Degas would bring back an appreciation of colour as well as of a variety of artistic techniques, gained in the company of Gustave Moreau. The second non-Italian thing he would bring to Paris was a taste for such artists as Rembrandt, Velázquez, Rubens, and most of all Anthony van Dyck.2 This was in fact a confirmation of his preoccupations before leaving for Italy and the experience would shape his Parisian projects of the early 1860s. In my mapping Degas’s Italian years of self-learning as a modern artist, his study of the Italian masters became a question of developing a sound artistic education, but while this was a necessity which followed the demands of professionalism, we will see that when responding to art on the basis of affinity, Degas in Italy chose his models among the Northern European masters. Degas arrived in Naples on 17 July 1856, and there passed the summer and part of the autumn, dividing the time between his grandfather’s townhouse, palazzo Pignatelli di Monteleone, and his summerhouse, located in the wood of Capodimonte. Between excursions around Naples, Degas did some pencil portraits of his cousins and copies at the Museo Borbonico, and painted a view from his grandfather’s house in the hills behind the city. He then left Naples for Rome, where he preferred to spend the winters. In Rome he sketched from the statues in the Vatican and in the Capitoline Museums and he worked from the frescoes in the churches. At

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the Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, he took notes on the artworks by Claude Lorrain and Raphael. On his way from Rome back to Naples in August 1857, Degas stopped to sketch landscapes and the life of the villages along the Tyrrhenian coast, such as Terracina, Fondi, and Gaeta. In Naples, he spent the summer sketching in the churches, and from the classical paintings and statues in the Museo Borbonico. He also took notes on landscapes and often drew from memory. During this stay Degas painted two portraits of his grandfather René-Hilaire. Degas was also very concerned with Christian themes for history painting, as shown by the many illustrations and compositional studies in his notebooks, inspired by the Bible and Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.3 Degas would eventually execute two oils, a St. John the Baptist and the Angel and a Dante and Virgil, sent to his father in Paris in November 1858. One can see from the studies and sketches in the notebooks of these years, punctuated with quotations from, as well as his own comments on, the Divine Comedy, that he was deeply engaged in his self-learning project. Modestly, the young Degas could measure by himself how much he still had to learn, as he noted: “Que je me penètre bien que je ne sais rien du tout. C’est le seul moyen d’avancer.” or “Ah! Comme le doute et l’incertitude me fatiguent. 4 In October 1857 Degas left again for Rome, where he would spend most of his time in Italy. Occasionally he visited the surroundings, studying landscapes of the Roman Campagna, as he did in Tivoli in November 1857.5 In the notebook he used in Rome in these months, Degas sketched from the Roman statues and from Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, and from Anthony van Dyck’s double portrait of Lucas and Cornelis de Wael, at the Capitoline Museums. Previously, in Rome, he had taken notes on Raphael’s double portrait of Andrea Navagero and Agostino Beazzano, and, as we will see, only later in the 1860s the importance of these double portraits for Degas would be evident: Degas would then express, through portraiture and self-portraiture, his concern for such issues as self-fashioning, democracy, and fraternity among modern Parisian artists struggling for recognition. To return to Rome in 1857-58, while showing in his notebooks his interest in Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Velázquez, Degas joined the French artists who attended the evening drawing classes at the Académie de France in the Villa Medici.6 Director of the Académie de France was then Jean-Victor Schnetz (1787-1870), a former pupil of David. Schnetz had never been a Prix de Rome winner, but had gone to Rome anyway, and by his own means, to pursue in solitude the study of painting. He became a member of the Institut in 1837 and twice director of the Académie de France (1841-46

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and 1853-66). Schnetz was a determined man, and a modern artist of the juste milieu, “ni tout à fait romantique ni tout à fait classique…”, one of many representing the “troisième voie,” a visual idiom common during the July Monarchy.7 Schnetz had in fact gained numerous admirers with his preferred subjects, “scènes familières entre des paysans d’Italie,” which did not lack “une grâce, une élévation unie au naturel.” Without straying from David’s teachings about the purity of drawing, Schnetz, according to Delécluze, singled himself out by treating his modern scenes “en les ajustant avec une originalité et un naturel qui leur donnaient le charme de la nouveauté.”8 At the Villa Medici, Degas met Prix de Rome artists such as Emile Lévy, Camille Clère, Elie Delaunay, and the sculptor Henri Chapu. He met the musician Georges Bizet, the painter Léon Bonnat, and the engraver Joseph Tourny, who was executing copies from the Sistine Chapel commissioned by Adolphe Thiers. In early 1858, Degas met Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), who was travelling in Italy with his friend Frédéric de Courcy. Degas himself would travel with Moreau and spend three days in Pisa and Siena with him. Moreau was already known as a painter in Parisian circles. Being, as Loyrette has written, the strongest mind and the most eclectic personality of the French group working in Rome, Moreau became the guide of this close circle, whose contacts with Roman society and artists were very limited, if not non-existent, because of the cultural backwardness and provinciality of the city. At the time of their encounter in Italy in 1858, Degas was an unknown painter at the beginning of his career and he must have been pleased by his new friendship with a painter that already had a Parisian reputation.9 Moreau had a charismatic power for the young French artists in Rome. When he was not in Rome, as during his trips to Florence or Venice, his friends wrote to him to tell how they missed his assured judgment. They did so even after their return to Paris, in the spring of 1859, while Moreau prolonged his stay in Italy until September 1859. As for Degas, he admired Moreau and felt the absence of his confident attitude when they were parted, but Degas was never entirely dependent on Moreau’s strong opinion. Degas inclined to depression and enjoyed talking politics, while Moreau was always self-confident and encouraging to others, and was not interested in politics. As for artistic opinions, from their correspondence it appears that each of them had his marked preferences. Moreau was almost exclusively devoted to Carpaccio, while Degas, beside a predilection for Van Dyck, thought that more than one artist deserved to be described as great: Botticelli, Giorgione, Veronese, Rembrandt, and Mantegna among others. Moreau had a vocation: to become a history painter, and restore the

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genre to prominence in modern art. To achieve this goal he had gone to Italy for two years, to study carefully all aspects of art, technical and theoretical. He studied drawing, but was attracted above all by the power of colour as used by Veronese and Titian, and by the Dutch and Flemish masters.10 Degas, instead, as one can see from his notebooks, had embarked on a project of self-teaching spanning all the artistic genres. This made him receptive both to Moreau’s single-minded ideas on history painting and to his predilection for warm colours, which would be reflected in the history paintings Degas worked on at his return to France from Italy, between 1859 and until 1865. In July 1858 Degas left Rome for Florence, where he would stay with the family of his aunt Laure Bellelli, including her husband Gennaro and their two daughters, Giulia and Giovanna, at their apartment in piazza Maria Antonia.11 Degas’s arrival in Florence prompted Auguste to write to his son letters in which he repeatedly insisted on the necessity for Edgar to acquaint himself with the Florentine masters of the early Renaissance, to travel to Viterbo and Orvieto, and other places of artistic interest in central Italy. What is important in Degas’s Italian trip is that his itinerary and understanding of art in the company of Moreau clashed with the plans his father Auguste was attempting to draw up for his son in letters from Paris. These were full of suggestions and instructions, expressing Auguste’s concern for his son’s artistic education, but above all the father’s Primitivist inclinations. While the letters written to Edgar by Auguste and other family members have been conserved, the letters that Edgar must have written in reply have vanished. The lack of this evidence makes it impossible to know how Degas responded to his father’s letters, which are replete with intolerant comments on the kind of art that attracted Degas. This we know from Edgar’s notebooks and letters to friends, which tell us that Degas did not share his father’s conviction of the absolute superiority of the pure clarity of the Italian pre-Raphaelites. This is not to say that Degas did not appreciate what he saw in Viterbo or Orvieto on his way to Florence in July 1858: his notebooks witness that he did, but it is evident that, influenced by Moreau in Florence, Degas was following his own Italian path and affirming his avant-gardism. In letters to his son, one senses both Auguste’s own enthusiasm for the Florentine painters who preceded Raphael, and the fact that Auguste had not seen with his own eyes most of the monuments he was commenting upon. We know that the Degas family read Le Magasin Pittoresque, a cheap illustrated journal for popular consumption published since 1833, with articles on art, architecture, literature, and other topics, and illustrated with woodblock prints, the kind of publication that elitist critics saw as

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offensive in its democratisation of cultivated pursuits.12 In one issue of the Magasin Pittoresque, for instance, as he wrote to Edgar, Auguste had read an article on the church of the Orsanmichele in Florence. The article concluded that, even if all of Florence was destroyed and only that little church survived, that would be enough, in Auguste’s words, to vouch for “the immense talent and exquisite taste of the ancient Florentine masters. It is therefore absolutely beautiful.”13 Auguste was either commenting on an earlier account by Edgar of a visit to that church or indirectly suggesting his son visit it. But it is evident that Auguste was worried about Edgar’s inclinations, as he continued: Tu sais que je suis loin de partager ton avis sur Delacroix, ce peintre s’est abandonné à la fougue de ses idées, et a négligé multiplier l’art du dessin, l’arche sainte dont tout dépend, il s’est complètement perdu. Quant à Ingres, s’il s’est élevé par le dessin, il est néanmoins resté bien au-dessous des grands maîtres Italiens, et quand on le regarde sans… [illegible word] en faisant abstraction de qui et de quand et d’où sont ses tableaux, on demeure de plus en plus convaincu de son infériorité relative.

Auguste agreed that, if the renaissance of the art of painting was to happen, Ingres, master of the line, would have contributed to it by indicating to others the way to perfection, namely, mastering the supreme art of drawing, or at least by stimulating those capable to reach such perfection. Auguste even agreed with Ingres’s definition of Romantic painters such as Delacroix as “barbarians.”14 Nevertheless, Ingres remained a follower of Raphael, whose art betrayed a pagan sensuality, and Auguste concluded: “les maîtres du XV sont les véritables, les seuls guides, quand on est bien empreints d’eux et qu’impressionnés d’eux on perfectionne sans cesse ses moyens d’action dans l’étude de la nature, on doit arriver à un résultat.” Besides his reading of the Magasin Pittoresque, Auguste’s reliance upon the purity, clarity, and simplicity of the art of the early Renaissance Florentines as the foundation of painting was also affected by being drawn to a Primitivist trend that had found expression in the Catholic revival and saw Italian art of the early Renaissance as the purest and most poetic Christian art, a culmination followed by the decline of the High Renaissance. Primitivism was one of the historicist artistic styles current during the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. It was discernible both in the revival of Christian Primitivist painting and architecture seen in the decorative commissions carried out in the numerous churches being built or restored in Paris in the 1830-60s, and in the contemporary critical reflection on the dignity and morality of Christian subjects in art. This was the elaboration of French clergymen who had come in contact with similar German ideas either in Germany or

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in Rome, where the Nazarenes worked at the convent of Sant’Isidoro around Franz Overbeck. Furthermore, German ideas associating the notion of primitive with the Gothic civilisation were propagated in France by Raczynski’s Art moderne en Allemagne (1836) and Fortoul’s De l’art en Allemagne (1841). In France these ideas could flourish in a modern Romantic neo-Gothic sensibility and over a pre-existing Classical “tradition du grand genre, le gout de l’art sévère.”15 Indeed, in 1855 Delécluze called “Barbus d’à présent” (modern primitives) both the artists gravitating around Ingres’s studio and the Romantic ones, even though they were not all practising Christians. By the 1850-60s a theory of Christian art was fully formed, founded on the Italian art of the Quattrocento. This was idealised as the art of a time when faith and Christian morality underscored the production of art by providing artists with true divine inspiration, beginning with Cimabue and Giotto, at the setting of the Middle Ages, and before Raphael. In France, philosophers such as Alexis-François Rio, Montalembert, the Abbé Jouve, Coquerel, Jollivet, the Abbé Hurel, provided a pre-Raphaelite theory of Christian art as an ideal, divine, spiritual artistic idiom which, unlike that of Classical times praised by Johann-Joachim Winckelmann, could not exist without the Christian revelation.16 There was also Victor Cousin, whose Leçons presented a less orthodox and very influential philosophy and aesthetics that aimed to spiritualise and Christianise the ideal beauty of classical origin. In all these theories, the Renaissance was seen as a time of decadence, as expressed in the art of Raphael, while Beato Angelico, the monk who painted on his knees, embodied the sanctity and the perfection of the Christian artist.17 The exemplary modern Christian painter in midnineteenth-century France was Hippolite Flandrin, “nouvel Angelico” in Théophile Gautier’s words, an artist trained by Ingres and who was, unlike Ingres himself, a good Christian.18 But not even Flandrin, “Fra Angelico de notre âge,” was good enough for Auguste. It is as if Auguste’s exclusive praise of the superiority of the Florentines of the fifteenth century, which runs through all his letters to Edgar, was meant to ward off concerns that his son in Italy was cultivating above all his taste for Delacroix (which was a sign of his Parisian avant-gardism), for the Venetians, and for Anthony van Dyck, as we will see. On 13 August 1858, Auguste observed that on his way from Rome to Florence Edgar must have seen some truly beautiful things in Viterbo and Orvieto: Il y a des églises magnifiques où les maîtres Florentins ont déployé la fine fleur de leur valeur. C’est qu’en effet l’art dans leur mains était la fleur qui à peine éclose a une élégance et un parfum plus doux. Elle est dans toute sa

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candeur. Quoi qu’on dise de leurs imperfections, ce sont les maîtres des maîtres et l’on doit se passionner d’eux.

In the notebook for his journey between Rome and Florence, Degas had noted at his arrival in Viterbo that the town seemed to him surprisingly like Avignon, “absolument la Provence.” He went twice to see the “superb” frescoes in S. Maria della Verità, but Degas’s impressions were not as exalted as his father’s, because Auguste’s cult of drawing was fanatical. In the same letter of 13 August, he wrote to Edgar that Tourny, one of the French artists Edgar had met in Rome, was back in Paris and had visited him to show his drawings of the Sistine Chapel. Auguste judged Tourny’s manner as “mou, flasque, sans vigueur aucune,” a drawing style not unlike “that of a little girl.” And yet, wrote Auguste disappointed, Tourny “is a man of taste and of an assured taste.” He was now impatient to see Tourny’s drawing of La Disputa di Atene, whereby “he might pick up” in his opinion. On 28 August, Auguste wrote to Edgar complaining about the weather in Paris and wondering about “all the marvels you have seen on the way from Rome to Florence,” at Orvieto the frescoes by Luca Signorelli “in all their splendour,” while in Florence there must still be beautiful mural paintings. At Orvieto, in fact, Degas had noted how he was “tout saisi” by the “sublime cathedral” and how he had run to and fallen in a reverie in front of Signorelli’s frescoes: as he wrote, Signorelli’s “ingénieux, palpitants arabesques avec une sorte de rage” made such a contrast to the peaceful fresco of Beato Angelico above it.19 In Orvieto, he noted that he was not drawn to landscape as much as he was to figure painting: he did not feel “l’entrain d’aller dessiner d’après nature. Signorelli me passionne. Il faut que je pense aux figures avant tout, ou au moins que je les étudie en pensant.” Furthermore, despite the beauty of Italy, his love for France was stronger, he confessed.20 If the movement raging in Signorelli captured Degas, he remained in his language admiring and respectful, somehow detached, in contrast to his father, who, informed Degas, on October 6, 1858, that he had been to see the exhibition of the envois de Rome where “everything is deplorably weak,” he declared.

2. “Rubens, what for?” In order to know what in fact Degas was gaining from his Italian trip while under the fire of his father’s letters, we have to turn to the romantic mood of the correspondence that Degas in Florence was exchanging in the same weeks with Moreau in Rome. On 21 September 1858, Degas described to Moreau, whom he imagined totally absorbed by family, and

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by colour, his lonely and bored days in Florence, his sadness worsened by his reading of Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales. While Auguste carried on about the Florentines, Degas updated Moreau on his progress: having completed his sketch from Giorgione, he copied from Veronese, and was about to start a new study from Giorgione’s Judgement of Solomon. He was impatiently waiting for Moreau to join him in Florence, as he wanted Moreau to tell him about, or take him to see, Carpaccio. For his part, Degas wanted to take Moreau to see Botticelli’s Primavera, then at the Accademia.21 In early October 1858, Moreau entrusted his reply letter with his friend Antoine Koenigswarter, who gave it to Degas in person.22 Always supportive, Moreau encouraged Degas to drop the sadness, along with Pascal, and to focus on painting and drawing, and on Giorgione and Botticelli. He also promised to tell Degas about Carpaccio when he would find the words. When Moreau finally arrived in Florence, the two began studying art together. At the Uffizi, Degas sketched from Verrocchio, Leonardo, Bellini, and Bronzino, as well as from Van Dyck’s Equestrian Portrait of Charles V and Frans Snyders’s Boar Hunt which would inspire Degas’s own The Boar; at Palazzo Pitti, Degas copied from Botticelli’s Young Man in a Capuche and from the Portrait of Philip IV on Horseback by Velázquez.23 Moreau did three drawing portraits of Degas in Florence (at the Musée Gustave Moreau), while Degas would portray Moreau after their return to Paris (Fig. 2-1). The idea that Degas in his youth was infatuated with drawing and with Ingres, a taste he especially cultivated in his Italian journey, has been ceaselessly repeated by art historians and is now a commonplace of Degas studies. It appears that drawing was in fact his father’s idée fixe.24 Edgar was willingly studying Italian art, and was enthusiastic about it, but the drawing of the Florentines made in fact little impact on his painting.25 Auguste feared this: in a letter of October 1858, he expressed his concern that Degas was spending too much time in the Uffizi and not enough in the churches. Then he suggested that Edgar should visit Genoa’s palaces in via Balbi, “with their unequalled staircases.” Auguste was becoming impatient for Edgar to return to France. Edgar had told him that he was about to begin a portrait of his aunt Laure and that he wished to finish it before going back home. He had also executed a large number of studies (Fig. 2-2) for a large family portrait, The Bellelli Family. He would finally bring the canvas with himself back to Paris in 1859 and he would work at it until 1867, the year he exhibited it at the Salon des Artistes Français (Fig. 3-1). On 25 November 1858, Auguste replied that there was no time for a well-done portrait, it would certainly be a failure and Edgar should limit himself to doing a beautiful drawing,

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Fig. 2-1 Portrait of Gustave Moreau, 1860, oil on canvas, cm 40 x 22, Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris.

Fig. 2-2 Study of Hands, 1858, oil on canvas, cm 38x 46, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

instead. By the way, he added, it was time for his son to pack up and return to Paris. He did not conclude his letter without his usual recommendation that Edgar look closely at the frescoes of the “adorable masters” of the fifteenth century, “saturating his spirit with them” and execute watercolours to fix the memory of their tints in his mind, especially Giorgione’s. Only five days later, on 30 November, Auguste wrote to Edgar again, saying he approved of Moreau’s taste for Carpaccio,

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that even his friend Mr Beaucousin thought “it was magnificent” and that the copy Edgar had once made from the little St Stephen at the Louvre, “with its beautiful fabrics,” “made him well think that he was in fact a great master.” We see here that Degas could in fact exercise some influence on Auguste, too. The father recommended that in copying the Venetians Edgar beware the “gingerbread effect, it is the precipice into which fall all those who say they want to do warm colours which they actually do not see or cannot see in copying the Venetian masters and then in wanting to reproduce them d’après nature.” In early January, Auguste stated clearly that he did not like Delacroix (unlike Edgar), and wasn’t convinced by Ingres. A few weeks later, he confronted his son: he understood, he wrote, that Edgar “should be consulting Rembrandt,” but Rubens, “what for?” While studying Italian art, Degas was in fact cultivating his avant-garde interest for Delacroix, Rembrandt, Rubens, and above all Van Dyck, the last a recurring reference in his Italian correspondence with Moreau. Against the vision of a Degas classicist, to which the history of art has accustomed us, it appears that it is this look northward, and the reference to the painters of the Northern Baroque that run through the painting of Degas from his beginnings, informing his avant-gardism with a distinctive symbolic geography. From his letter to Moreau of 27 November, we know that Degas was then feeling much better because a few common friends had joined him in Florence. He had given up copying at museums, and was very busy working on a family portrait of his aunt Laure and her two daughters, Giulia and Giovanna. He wrote about his young cousins: L’aînée est réellement une petite beauté. La petite a de l’esprit comme un démon et de la bonté comme un petit ange. Je les fais avec leurs robes noires et des petits tabliers blancs qui leur vont à ravir. Je voudrais une certaine grâce naturelle avec une noblesse que je ne sais comment qualifier. Van Dyck est un fameux artiste, Giorgione aussi, Botticelli aussi, Mantegna aussi, Rembrandt aussi, Carpaccio aussi.26

Degas left Florence on 29 March 1859 for his return trip to Paris. Once back, he wrote for Moreau a detailed account of his journey. He had stopped in Genoa, first, where he had been able to pursue the interest in Flemish and Venetian painting: Gênes, belle et superbe ville! Ah ! les beaux Van Dyck. Allez au palais Brignole, si vous passez à Gênes à votre retour, et regardez bien la comtesse Brignole seule, puis une dame de la famille avec sa fille, un Véronèse, et un portrait d’une dame vénitienne toutes en valeurs claires. On n’a jamais rendu la grâce et la finesse de la femme, l’élégance et la

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chevalerie de l’homme, ni la distinction de tous les deux comme Van Dyck ! Il y a plus chez ce grand génie qu’une disposition naturelle, mon cher ami, comme vous le disiez un jour, je crois que bien souvent il réfléchissait sur son sujet et s’en pénétrait en poète. Etait-ce le lieu qui contribuait tant à l’illusion et qui tenait si bien encore à ses anciens maîtres, ou bien étais-je un peu monté d’avance ? Je n’en peux rien dire, mais j’ai eu une heure de bon enthousiasme.

He then proceeded to Turin and visited the gallery at Palazzo Madama, still concerning himself with Van Dyck and Velázquez: Je n’aime pas beaucoup le grand Véronèse. Vous verrez une tête de Philippe IV de Vélasquez, et des Van Dyck, plus ou moins estimés, mais toujours aussi beaux pour moi. Vous rappelez vous quand vous m’approuviez nous disant qu’on aimait le tempérament d‘un peintre de telle sorte que les bonnes et les mauvaises pensées nous séduisent toujours également.

After a stop at the Castello del Valentino, and after crossing the MontCenis, Degas was in the Savoie, at Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, then at the Bourget lake, where, as he learnt from his guidebook, Rousseau had lived. The last halt was Mâcon in the evening, before the arrival at Paris in the early morning, to wake up everyone at home.27 As he left behind three years of learning from the artworks of Italy, Degas’s language was never as lively, inspired and ecstatic as when he found himself in front of the portraits of Van Dyck. On 2 April 1859, Degas was in Palazzo Rosso, at Genoa, sketching from and taking notes in front of Van Dyck’s portrait of Paolina Brignole-Sale, and musing over the love of the painter for the countess: Est-ce disposé par l’aventure de l’amour de van Dyck pour la comtesse Brignole, ou bien est-ce sans prédisposition, qu’il me semble adorable? On ne fait plus une femme, une main plus souple et plus distingué [sic]. On est réellement pris. Il y a plus peut être chez van Dyck. Elle droite et légère comme un oiseau. Sa tête c’est le sang de la vie dans la grâce et la finesse. Petit nez ferme, bouche pincée et relevée. Des yeux à percer de bonnes sourires.28

Furthermore, it was in Rembrandt that Degas sought a model for his own art. In the notebook he was using in 1859-60, during his last weeks in Italy, and in Paris on his return, Degas noted next to a sketch for a planned group portrait: “Faire le portrait d’une famille à l’air dans l’esprit et toutes les audaces de la Ronde de Nuit mais il faut être bien peintre.”29 That same notebook marked his beginnings as a modern Parisian painter: while

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Degas studied the composition for his large family portrait of The Bellelli Family, he noted his interest in such modern French painters as Delacroix, Géricault, Alfred de Dreux and for such themes as biblical stories, horses and horseracing. Indeed, as we will see, Degas was now ready to engage with portraiture, genre, and history painting in his own painting in the 1860s.

Notes 1

Loyrette, 1984, p. 19. Loyrette, 1984, p. 39. 3 See Notebook 9 in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 62-4 and Notebook 10 in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 64-7. 4 See Notebook 7, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 53-5 and Notebook 8, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 56-62. 5 See Notebook 9, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 64-7. 6 See Notebook 11, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 67-8. 7 Foucart, 1987, p. 288. 8 Delécluze, 1983, p. 391. 9 Since the early 1850s, Moreau was acquainted with the critic and painter Eugène Fromentin, with the Singer family, and with the Foulds. The latter, a powerful family of bankers and politicians, were his first supporters. They introduced him to the official milieu of the comte de Nieuwerkerke (Intendant des Beaux-Arts under Achille Fould’s Prime Minister-ship in 1853-1860) and the princess Mathilde. Moreau was a guest at court during the Second Empire, attending the Friday evening receptions at the Louvre since 1851, and the formal receptions at the castle in Compiègne in the 1860s. He appeared as one of the guests portrayed in F.- A. Biard’s painting, Le Salon de M. le Comte de Nieuwerkerke (1855, Musée National du Château de Compiègne). Moreau did not manage to sell works until 1864, when his success as a history painter became public and official at the Paris Salon, but he was known, thanks to a remarkable network of family acquaintances, and most of all, he had already exhibited at the Salon and also at the 1855 Exposition Universelle. See Pinchon, 2004. 10 See Capodieci, 2002. 11 Gennaro Bellelli had been exiled to Florence from the Kingdom of Naples due to his political activity in the Risorgimento. 12 See Marrinan, 2009, p. 342. 13 René, Edgar’s youngest brother, collected the Magasin Pittoresque. In his letter of January 1859, Auguste complained that before leaving for Italy Edgar had lent to someone the issue of the Magasin Pittoresque in which he had read the article on Orsanmichele. Edgar had thus broken his little brother’s collection, did he by any chance remember to whom he had lent the magazine? inquired Auguste. 14 In Silvestre, 1855, pp. 1-2. 15 Foucart, 1987, p. 6. 2

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See Foucart, 1987 for a comprehensive treatment of religious painting in France in the decades between 1800 and 1860. 17 See for instance Cartier, 1857. 18 Théophile Gautier, obituary of 24 July 1864 in Le Moniteur Universel, in Portraits contemporains, 1874. 19 See Notebook 11, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 67-73. 20 “Je pense à la France qui n’est pas si belle, mais l’amour de chez moi et du travail dans un petit coin l’emporte encore sur le désir de jouir toujours de cette belle nature.”: Notebook 11, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 67-73. 21 Letter 195, in Capodieci, 2002, pp. 450-52. 22 Letter 198, in Capodieci, 2002, pp. 455-59. 23 See Notebook 12 in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 73-8. 24 The cult of drawing and of the Primitives was of Auguste’s generation. Ingres himself had become an adept of a purer archaic art while he was a disciple of Jacques-Louis David. The topics of discussion amongst the pupils in David’s atelier caused them to be split in different factions, and the Primitifs with which Ingres sided cultivated the superior simplicity and purity of the Etruscans and of the Greeks preceding the age of Phidias. Ingres subsequently became inculcated with the Tuscan artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and with Raphael: see Alazard, 1950, pp. 17-8, and pp. 121-34 for a presentation of the phenomenon of ingrisme. Also see Amaury-Duval, 1924. 25 Degas cultivated his Ingrisme in the 1890s and subsequent years, when he became a collector of Ingres’s artworks and sought the company of other collectors of Ingres like him. In 1902, he went to visit Adrien Mithouard, who had just acquired Ingres’s Vénus à Paphos (Musée d’Orsay), and Degas, admiring the “formidable backbone” of Ingres’s Venus, declared: “Les femmes d’Ingres sont des animaux magnifiques. Celle-ci n’est pas une femme mais un veau, un veau magnifique,” adding that “Le premier qui a dit qu’une femme rassemblait à une fleur était un amant, le second un imbécile.”: Fosca, 1921. 26 Letter 201, in Capodieci, 2002, pp. 462-65. 27 Letter 225, in Capodieci, 2002, pp. 504-6. 28 Notebook 13, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 78-83. 29 Notebook 13, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 78-83.

CHAPTER THREE HISTORY PAINTING

1. The studio, 13 rue de Laval Back in Paris in early April 1859, Degas returned to his father’s apartment at 4 rue de Mondovi. While Moreau, Tourny, Delaunay, and Bonnat were still in Italy, Degas kept company with a few friends who were also back in Paris: Frédéric de Courcy, Emile Lévy, and Antoine Koenigswarter. The latter introduced him to Eugène Lacheurié, another friend of Moreau. All had their art studios at the foot of the Montmartre hill, where Degas would soon join them. Meanwhile, they pursued their study of modern French art. With Courcy and Koenigswarter, Degas visited the 1859 Paris Salon, where he saw and sketched from Eugène Fromentin’s Bateleurs Nègres dans les Tribus, one of two canvases Fromentin had on show at the Salon, and which Degas considered as the only masterpieces there, as he wrote in his letter to Moreau of April 26.1 At the Salon, Degas also saw Delacroix’s eight exhibits, and later sketched from memory in his notebooks from two of the works seen there, the Entombment and Ovid Exiled among the Scythians.2 After the months spent in Italy discussing colour with Moreau, Degas’s interest in Delacroix, to his father’s dislike, was so intense that, in those months immediately following his return, Degas was “actively seeking that master’s works everywhere in Paris,” as Reff has written. While he was working at his first and largest history painting, The Daughter of Jephthah, Degas went to study Delacroix wherever he could: at the Louvre, in the Galerie d’Apollon, and from The Massacres at Chio.3 Degas went to study Delacroix at the Chamber of Deputies, at Versailles, at the church of SaintDenis-du-Saint-Sacrement and at the Galerie Martinet, in the boulevard des Italiens, which was then exhibiting paintings by Delacroix.4 He took notes on composition and colour, adding comments to his sketches. In this atmosphere, Degas set to work on The Daughter of Jephthah. This work, compared to Degas’s earlier achievements, testifies to a change in his palette and to a new dynamism in his composition. But he wouldn’t be

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able to start work on this large canvas before moving to his own independent studio, in October 1859. At the beginning of 1859, Auguste was urging Edgar, who was still in Italy, to return to France. The painter had asked his father to find a studio for him in Paris. Auguste had seen a few and found that the rents were excessively high. He was also asking friends to help in the search, but felt that Edgar should see to the question of the studio at his return.5 In the autumn, a studio for Degas was finally found at 13 rue de Laval, in the same street as Courcy’s studio (at 39 rue de Laval), and very close to Moreau’s. In late September 1859 Moreau had returned to his family house at 14 rue de La Rochefoucauld, where he would live the rest of his life and which is today the Musée Gustave Moreau. While still living with his father at 4 rue de Mondovi Degas had now returned as an artist in the same quartier Saint-Georges where he was born, once known as the Nouvelle Athènes. This would from now on be his district, where Degas was no longer an apprentice, but an artist working in his studio in Pigalle and mingling with his peers. This area of the Paris Right Bank lying to the north, beyond the boulevards and at the foot of the Montmartre hill, had become the ninth arrondissement in 1860, and by the same date it had also become the area where the new generation of painters, as well as many of the older ones, wanted to reside. This convergence of place and avantgarde painting is taken into account in the definition “Ecole de Batignolles.”6 Degas took his first studio at 13 rue de Laval. This edifice was the property of a Mr Louis Auguste Bédel, “tapissier,” as we know from the records of the 1862 Paris survey. It was a five-storey stone building with a sixth floor “sous les combles,” and was prolonged to the right by a six-storey wing overlooking the internal courtyard. The atelier de peinture, with small separate kitchen, rented by Degas between October 1859 and April 1872, was on the sixth floor of the internal building. The construction was composed of five “petits appartements,” fifteen “logements ou petites locations” and one “boutique” at the ground level of the building on the rue de Laval. In our attempt at tracing the origin of later typical Degas subjects such as Parisian laundresses and hat-makers, it is illuminating to learn that between 1865 and 1874, the ground level boutique of the building at 13 rue de Laval was subsequently occupied by a Mme Hutin, “blanchisseuse de fin,” a Mme Gileu, “modiste à façon,Ý Mr Pascal, “gantier,” Mr Gilles, “relieur de livres,” Mr Chatté, “brocanteur,” and finally by a Mme Lamothe, “blanchisseuse.” In this artisan and working-class district, established in his atelier under the roof at 13 rue de Laval, Degas could finally be on his own and set to work at his portraits and at large compositions for the Paris Salon, while also developing strong

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interest in horses and race-course scenes since 1859-1860. Degas was therefore working in many genres.

2. The Bellelli Family While thinking about large canvases inspired by literary subjects destined to the Salon, Degas followed his father’s advice to keep doing portraits. Family members and friends sat to him, while he resumed work on the large family portrait of his Italian relatives, begun in Florence. The Bellelli Family (Fig. 3-1) included his aunt Laure, her husband Gennaro, and their daughters Giulia and Giovanna, whom Degas had started sketching in Florence at the end of 1858, filling notebooks and sketchbooks with numerous studies.

Fig. 3-1 The Bellelli. Family, 1858-67, oil on canvas, cm 200 x 250, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

He had worked enthusiastically and exclusively at it, intending to leave the painting in Florence as a souvenir.7 In fact, he took it to Paris, where he would keep working at the portrait until its exhibition as Portrait de famille at the Salon of 1867.8 In this apparently decorous painting,

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appropriately for a sujet de famille, the figures are arranged in a carefully rendered interior, whose domesticity surfaces in the furnishings, the wallpaper, the mirror, the clock on the mantelpiece, and the dog on the right-hand side. It is a complex group portrait: Laure is standing and dressed in black in mourning for the death of her father René-Hilaire, who had passed away in Naples at the end of August 1858, while Degas was in Florence. Laure’s remoteness and grave stance emerge against the light blue wallpaper, next to the gilded frame enclosing René-Hilaire’s portrait. At the other end, Gennaro is caught in profile, sitting in an armchair on the right-hand side of the picture, offering to the view his back, delineated between the fireplace and the armchair. This pose could be an allusion to his exile from Naples for his political activities in the Risorgimento. Laure’s left arm is outstretched to reach the secrétaire in order to support herself, with the other arm resting on the shoulders of her daughter Giovanna. The latter is looking at the viewer, while Giulia occupies the centre of the canvas, informally sitting on a chair: her left leg is bent and hidden under her dress, her elbows are sticking out, and her fists against her sides. The portrait looks austere, solemn, but isn’t really: it is crossed by waves of tension passing in the expressive gestures of the Bellellis: they are restless, they move their hands, they position their legs, turn their heads. The strange plot of this family’s emotional bond is captured in the emphasis on Laure’s absorption in her emotiveness, and in Gennaro’s looking at his daughters, while the dog exits the scene, almost a reverse image of the Arnolfini’s dog. In this group portrait, then, Degas proves his skills at the characterisation of individuals, while his technique comes to life in the capturing of surfaces, and in conveying their light, as in the rendering of the wallpaper pattern, or the vigorous brushstrokes that model the white aprons of the girls, or Gennaro’s balding head shown by means of fluent paint. We know what Degas was trying to give form to with this painting: Je voudrais une certaine grâce naturelle avec une noblesse que je ne sais comment qualifier. Van Dyck est un fameux artiste, Giorgion [sic] aussi, Botticelli aussi, Mantegna aussi, Rembrandt aussi, Carpaccio aussi.9

A few months later, in Genova, in front of the portraits of the Marchese Anton-Giulio Brignole-Sale, of his wife, Marchesa Paolina Brignole-Sale, and of his sister Geronima Brignole-Sale and her daughter Aurelia, all in Palazzo Rosso, he would find confirmation of his idea that no one had ever equalled Van Dyck in the rendering of the grace and fineness of a woman, the elegance and chevalerie of a man, and the distinction of both. While we have grown accustomed to a view of Degas as a classicist, it is in fact a

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modernist reference to Northern European art that runs through all of Degas’s art and his search for personal expression through his deliberate attachment to and modern interpretation of the Northern baroque. Ideologically and culturally, Degas’s look northward expressed both his individualism and a nationalism aspiring to modernise France and its culture. In Van Dyck’s full-length portraits of aristocratic ladies Degas found the model of an elegant and grand portrait that he would use to represent the women of his own family. In 1863 he painted the engagement portrait of his sister Thérèse, just before her marriage to their Neapolitan cousin, Edmondo Morbilli, alluded to through the view of Naples in the background. In the Portrait of Thérèse Degas (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) Degas sought the same challenge: exploiting Thérèse’s restrained posture in order to make a display of graceful and animated elegance through details of dress, and seized through texture and colour in the quality of the fabrics. Thérèse is wearing an ample crinoline of a homogeneous colour, over which swells a silk and lace shawl. This offers a black, iridescent, grainy background to the motif of the long pink satin ribbons that tie her flowered bonnet with a large bow. The sashes and bows of Degas’s dancers are here announced, and declared is Degas’s quintessentially French love of fabrics and insertion of precious detail. Degas’s family portraits of these years engage with garment and function: in Achille de Gas as a Naval Ensign (The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), Degas shows his younger brother wearing the black naval uniform and trimmings of the career Achille pursued until November 1864, before settling as a business-man. He also executed the Portrait of Monsieur Ruelle, a clerk who worked in Auguste’s bank, and whom Degas portrayed in habit noir and holding a ledger (Musée des Beaux Arts, Lyon). These family portraits were not for Degas just a way of bringing out his skills as a portraitist. While he seized and exposed the appearances and roles of his close relatives in the passing of time, these portraits also certainly elicited on his part considerations of social status, professional condition, and marital arrangements that concerned himself, too, as he must have weighed the claims of social expectations with the claims of artistic aspirations. In Degas’s life and work, the family portraits of these years somehow reconcile with the history paintings discussed below, in terms of the artist’s reflection on the issue of marriage for the modern artist. In these years, his notebooks often refer to the subject of marriage in painting and in literary sources, and more concrete indications of Degas’s concern with married life at the time are to be found in some of his paintings. The most important of these, The Bellelli Family is, as we have seen, a subtle family portrait, in which many art historians, through

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their examination of the letters exchanged between Laure and Edgar, have been able to read the painter’s rendering of an unhappy ménage.10

Fig. 3-2 Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli, c.1865, oil on canvas, cm 117.2 x 89.7, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

Fig. 3-3 Portrait of Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli, 1865, oil on canvas, cm 116.5 x 88.3, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

While he was at work on his history paintings, Degas would have certainly found food for thought in the occasion of the marriage of both his sisters. Thérèse married Edmondo Morbilli on 16 April 1863, at the church of the Madeleine, after obtaining papal dispensation to marry her first

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cousin. The same church was chosen for the marriage, in June 1865, of Marguerite and Henri Fevre, a Parisian architect. Degas portrayed the Morbilli couple in 1863, leaving this portrait unfinished (Fig. 3-2) and in 1865, probably on the occasion of Marguerite’s wedding.11 In the 1863 portrait, set in the drawing room at 4 rue de Mondovi, Degas produces, with equal attention to persons and objects, the familial presences and the wrapping materials and furniture of a bourgeois interior, such as the green wallpaper, the mirror on the wall to the left, and the maroon armchair in the foreground. Edmondo sits informally in the background, while Thérèse occupies two thirds of the painting, her dress prominently displayed and setting off her bright red shawl. We find the same attention to details of bourgeois dress in the 1865 Portrait of Edmondo and Thérèse Morbilli (Fig. 3-3) in which Degas assigns Edmondo a prominent position, remembering the composition and subject of Rembrandt’s self-portrait with his wife. Decades later, as we will see, the same image would play a role again, by providing Degas with a telling frame of reference for his photographic self-portrait (Fig. 10-3) in the company of Zoë Closier, his housekeeper, an allusion to his own household arrangements and to the important role of guardian that Zoë had come to assume in the maison d’artiste in which he lived his life of bachelor artist.

3. History paintings/Exceptional Women Settled in the studio at rue de Laval, and while pursuing the completion of the Bellelli Family and other family portraits, in these formative 1860s Degas painted all his history paintings: The Daughter of Jephthah, started in 1859; Semiramis Building Babylon (1860-62); Young Spartan Girls Provoking the Boys (1860-62) also known as Young Spartans Exercising, and the so-called Scene of War in the Middle Ages (1863-65).12 These history paintings can be read as Degas’s reflection on the irreconcilability of married life and artistic vocation. This was a major theme of discussion among artists and writers in nineteenth-century France, and it is material to my view that Degas was neither a misogynist nor a narrow-minded bourgeois. Far from endorsing patriarchal ideas on marriage and women, Degas chose to remain outside the patriarchal system and live as an artiste célibataire in accordance with the more extreme aspects of the nineteenthcentury French cult of the artist as genius. It is the idea of the exceptional status of the artist that Degas elaborates in his history paintings, and that rendered him unmarriageable. In The Young Spartans Exercising (186062) we see bachelors being banned from participation in the Gymnopaediae. In The Daughter of Jephthah (1859-61), Semiramis Building Babylon

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(1860-62), and Scene of War in the Middle Ages (1865), Degas shows femmes fortes, forceful females who are also great spinsters and who have chosen to pursue spiritual rather than mortal passions, all alter egos for the artiste célibataire who chooses a life of art making over a family-centred life. In these same years, Degas attempted another history subject that demonstrated his interest in the idea of restraining the passions: Alexander and Bucephalus (Fig. 3-4), only summarily executed. But this subject did not tie all the elements together. The femmes fortes, instead, pointed simultaneously to the concepts of sacrifice, exceptionality, and transgressive marginality, and therefore they resounded profoundly with the plight of the bachelor artist in France in the nineteenth century, who did not identify, in his refusal of the family obligations of a married man, with what was perceived to be the natural place of man in the order of society. Degas’s fantasy of female power, therefore, lies beyond feminism.

Fig. 3-4 Alexander and Bucephalus, 1861-62, oil on canvas, cm 115 x 89, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

For its subject, the denigration of bachelors in Lycurgan Sparta, The Young Spartans seem disconnected in meaning from the three representations of strong females. But, at a closer reading, the four paintings are brought together by a unifying theme loaded with autobiographical references to the artiste célibataire. The presence of forceful women in these history paintings does not offer apertis verbis indications about Degas’s position with regard to the amelioration of the political and social condition of women in his time. Degas lived and worked within a society in which women were perfectly capable of fighting their struggle for full civil rights. His femmes fortes speak for the

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cause of the artiste célibataire, through Degas’s choice to depict such exceptional women as Semiramis, Jephthah’s daughter and Mademoiselle d’Orléans, the French princess who, as is suggested here, may be figured as the archer in the Scene of War in the Middle Ages.13. To hold up these figures as ideals was not to suggest a broader and public endorsement of women in general or models to be emulated: on the contrary, it was perfectly compatible with a position of detachment from feminist ideologies and the actual changing condition of women with regard to property, the vote, and work in society at large. In his context of life and action, however, Degas routinely dealt with women who earned their living and who pursued professional advancement, and never questioned creativity in women, or feminine emancipation and ambition. That these women of history should be not simply heroic but also transgressive women is an important consideration for our understanding of why Degas chose them to represent individualism and artistic bachelorhood. Settled in the studio at 13 rue de Laval, Degas set to work on his first and largest history painting, a biblical subject: The Daughter of Jephthah (Fig. 3-5). According to Judges, 11, Jephthah was first exiled by his halfbrothers and then recalled in order to lead the Galadites in a war against the Ammonites. Jephthah vowed that, in order to secure his victory, he would offer to God the first person coming out of the door of his house at his return from the war. Victorious, Jephthah returned to his house at Mizpeh, where his daughter and only child was the first to come forth to greet him, playing tambourines and dancing. On seeing her, Jephthah tore his clothes apart lamenting that his vow to God could not be revoked. His daughter accepted her destiny and asked only to be given two months, during which she would wander across the mountains with her companions and weep over her maidenhood. She returned to her father, and Jephthah’s vow was fulfilled.14 For his painting, Degas imagined a green country setting as a background, and chose to represent Jephthah returning from the war, his horse led by a servant. Seeing his daughter, dressed in white, approaching in the midst of a group of women, he lifts his arm in a desperate gesture, remembering his vow. Degas’s canvas recalls the warm colours he had seen in Delacroix’s Pietà. For the motif of Jephthah on his horse with an arm upraised, he recalled Attila and his Barbarians Trampling Italy and the Arts, from the murals executed by Delacroix in the 1840s in the library of the Palais Bourbon.15 According to Reff, among Degas’s sources of inspiration for this work we find a poem by Alfred de Vigny, La Fille de Jephté (1820).16 Loyrette has emphasised that in Degas’s time the story of Jephthah’s daughter was undoubtedly taken to imply her human death in sacrifice to God.17 Indeed, in the poem

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by Vigny the virgin returns from her wandering in the mountains in order to offer herself to her father’s knife.18 Judges, however, does not say whether Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter to God meant her death or that she remained unwed and childless. Both interpretations of Jephthah’s vow have been offered.19 The exact fate of Jephthah’s daughter was beyond Degas’s concern. For the artist the interest of this Biblical story resided in the superhuman duty of the daughter of Jephthah, a destiny of spinsterhood and chastity. For Degas it was the story of a life that must be devoted to a superior cause, and thereby challenge the expectations of society. In the painting, Jephthah in the foreground despairs of the end of his line, because Judaism condemns celibacy except pre-marital female celibacy.20 From early on in his career, Degas was interested in figures of exceptional women. A notebook of 1856 reveals that he gave a significant amount of thought, in the form of compositional studies, to the subjects of Candaules’s wife, taken from Herodotus, and of Medea, as he sketched during a performance of Ernest Legouvé’s Médée in April that year, with Adelaide Ristori acting in the role.21 Fascinated by heroic women with great destinies, in a notebook used in Florence in 1858-59 Degas copied excerpts from the Vies des dames illustres françoises et étrangères (166566) by the Abbé de Brantôme, noting down a long passage describing Mary Stuart’s farewell to France.22 The Romantic element in Degas’s preoccupation with illustrious women of history and literature is also apparent in his history paintings. The theme of the destiny of the exceptional individual, signified by the strong female, emerges as Degas evokes the fate of Jephthah’s daughter, to remain a virgin; the accomplishments of Queen Semiramis, thriving in her newly-found unmarried state, and the bellicose Mademoiselle d’Orléans, whose dreams of marrying Louis XIV are dismantled by her going to war against him. In 1860 Degas undertook Semiramis Building Babylon and The Young Spartans Exercising. The latter work raises a different theme from that of exceptional women: the issue of the bachelor taboo. Numerous drawings and studies exist for The Young Spartans Exercising, and two painted versions. The earlier one, of about 1860, shows a group of girls on the left and a group of boys set against tree trunks on the right. Spartan mothers and children appear around a temple with Lycurgus the lawgiver. Sparta spreads behind them, and Mount Taygetos is outlined on the left. This work was left unfinished by Degas.23 The second version of the painting (Fig. 3-6) was begun sometime around 1860-62 and repeatedly reworked by Degas, in the late 1870s and possibly later.24 In comparison to the first version, the temple and the trees have disappeared, and the two

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groups of figures now w dramatically confront each other.. In the background,, we see the Spartan S motheers with Lycurrgus, and the houses h of Sparta far inn the distance. 25

Fig. 3-5 The D Daughter of Jepphthah, 1859-1861, oil on cannvas, cm 195.58 8 x 298.45, The Smith Coollege Museum m of Art, Northam mpton, Massacchusetts.

Fig. F 3-6 The Yooung Spartans Exercising, E c. 1860-62, 1 oil onn canvas, cm 10 09.5 x 155, The T National G Gallery, Londonn.

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This work has prompted a range of readings by various scholars. The Young Spartans Exercising has generally been read as a scene of conflict between women and men, taken by Degas from both Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus in Parallel Lives and from the Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (1787) by the Abbé Barthélemy.26 For Carol Salus, the painting represents a Spartan courtship ritual, in which “men were enticed to marry and women were exercising,” with Spartan costumes and hairstyles accurately depicted according to their symbolism. For example, the shorthaired girl “is either ready for marriage or already married,” while the long-haired girl would have been understood by the Spartans as a virgin.27 For Norma Broude, the work depicts “a challenge that would lead to an ensuing athletic competition,” representing Degas’s positive response to contemporary French feminism, which intensified in the late 1870s, when Degas decided to rework the painting.28 However, as Linda Nochlin has objected, this painting is about antagonism and hostility. Degas himself referred to the work either as “Young girls fighting in the Platanist under the eyes of the old Lycurgus and the mothers” or as “Young Spartan Girls Provoking Boys.” In fact, what is ultimately disturbing in the painting, for Nochlin, is “the provocative gesture of the girl on the left and the unbridgeable distance” between the group of girls and the group of boys, separated by a wide space.29 Nochlin attributes this tension not to Degas’s misogyny, a myth that she considers laid to rest by Broude, but to what she defines as “a more general nineteenth-century French ideology about women and sex, unconscious for the most part, and peculiarly rich in reticence and ambiguities in the case of Degas’s representations of the relations between men and women.”30 We read in Plutarch that the Spartan courtship ritual consisted of the “games, dances, and gambols, that girls performed all naked in the presence of men: not for the sake of wellthought out geometry, as Plato states, but for the sake of lovemaking.”31 In Degas’s painting, however, it is not the girls who are naked, but the boys. This suggests that Degas is illustrating the passage from Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus which mentions the ritual punishment that befell Spartan bachelors: they were banned from the parade ground where Spartans performed their exercises and subjected to public humiliation.32 Single men were excluded from the Gymnopaediae and humiliated by women at this gymnastic festival sacred to Apollo and which was held at Sparta every year after 670 B.C. The term Gymnopaediae has traditionally been translated as either “the naked boys’s dance,” “the festival of the naked boys” or “the Festival of the Naked Youths.”33 It is the ritual humiliation of young bachelors at the Gymnopaediae that we see in Degas’s painting, where the girls are clearly hostile to the naked boys and prevent them from

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taking part in the dance. In this painting Degas alludes to, and questions, the morals and the structure of his own society. Nineteenth-century French society was, not unlike Sparta, adverse to those who undermined the institution of the bourgeois family/State by exempting themselves from the essential duties of the citizen, marriage and procreation. The bachelor was considered to be unpatriotic and immoral because he was wifeless and childless, and was scorned as a threat to the social order and to the notion of public good founded on bourgeois morals that centered on the familial institution. A measure of the hostility towards bachelors in French society in the second half of the nineteenth century is evidenced by the Proposition d’un impôt sur le célibat. Lettre à Monsieur le Ministre des Finances, a proposal to tax bachelors advanced in 1871 by Dr Tardieu, under the pseudonym Démophile.34 In the second half of the nineteenth century, medical and social literature in France opposed celibacy, and espoused the democratic and progressive theories developed at the time by the “grands prophètes du progrès.” In the writings of Auguste Comte, Jules Michelet, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, the bourgeoisie was so safely grounded in the values of the family that the familial institution becomes identified with the State itself. Here, the ideal citizen is spouse and father.35 But there were artists and writers who defended bachelorhood as an alternative model of masculinity. Among the mid-nineteenth-century French avantgarde, Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, and Moreau had chosen celibacy as a way of negotiating the demands of life and the demands of art.36 Bachelorhood compounded “the tensions between man and artist as well as the compatibility of these two identities.”37 In the 1860s, convinced that married life obstructed creativity, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt and Gustave Flaubert discussed what Jean Borie has termed the question of the “célibat de l’artiste.” This is treated by the Goncourts in two novels, Les Hommes de lettres (1860), better known under the title of its second version, Charles Demailly, published in 1868, and Manette Salomon (1865). Demailly, a writer gifted with a “sensitivité nerveuse” and entirely taken by his writing, lives maritalement with the book he is writing. He proclaims that marriage is forbidden to writers, who are men “outside the social law, outside the conjugal law. After all bachelorhood is necessary to thought.”38 He lives by this belief until he falls in love with Marthe, a dancer, and marries her. One day, as Demailly is concentrating on a watercolour, Marthe offers a distracted comment on his achievement: “There! It’s pretty what you are doing … it is coloured.”39 These words reveal to Demailly the vacuity of his married life, as he realises that an irreparable mistake has consumed his creative life, bringing madness in the

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trail of existential failure.40 The same fate befalls the painter Naz de Coriolis in Manette Salomon. At the brilliant start of his career, Coriolis “has promised never to marry, not that marriage repelled him; but marriage seemed to him happiness denied the artist.”41 The claims of art, “the pursuit of invention, the silent incubation of the work, the concentration in the effort” cannot accommodate the ‘fonctionnarisme du marriage.’42 For the real artist is “a kind of savage and a social monster,”43 and bachelorhood the only condition “that left the artist his freedom, his forces, his brain, his conscience.”44 When Coriolis meets Manette, a painter’s model, he develops for her a passion that affects him both as a man and as an artist. As she moves in with him, and after the birth of their child, Coriolis’s creative power is negatively affected by the “slow and gradual infiltration of the feminine influence.”45 Over the years, Manette changes his life, his habits, even his working space: “It was like being slowly dispossessed of himself,” and only too late Coriolis realises that he has traded his talent and career for the demands and petty pleasures of conjugal life. 46 In L’Education Sentimentale (1869), Flaubert describes Frédéric Moreau’s arrival from the provinces in the Paris of Louis-Philippe. At eighteen, Moreau, embarking on legal studies, is full of literary and artistic ambitions, until he falls in love with Mme Arnoux, the wife of an acquaintance. For years he loves her in secret, while his fantasies of love and his fantasies of a career in politics feed each other in his conviction that “Love is the food and almost the atmosphere of genius. Extraordinary emotions produce sublime works of art.”47 But rather than pursuing these, he passes his lifetime cultivating emotions and lovers and, finally, fails to marry. Moreau cannot really love a woman. At the end of his egotistic life, the sentimental education he has accomplished is one of hopeless cynicism. In this literature, however, bachelorhood is rarely an explicit topic. As Borie has observed, the discourse on the artiste célibataire, the quintessential outsider, was conducted in disguise: the bachelor in nineteenth-century French art and literature appears only when protected by a mask or another identity or is hardly distinguishable among the secondary characters in a novel. The word bachelor, for instance, never appears in such examples of the littérature célibataire as Flaubert’s Correspondance and the Journal of the Goncourt brothers. For these authors, bachelorhood is not a “choix originel,” but the consequence of another primal choice, in favour of the “freedom of imagination and rigour of creation,” of a “vocation enivrante,” a “carrière monacale” that leaves no time for other obligations.48 The occultation of the bachelor narrative

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has also been observed in British and American pre-modernist and modernist fiction.49 A similar attempt at concealing moral and marital themes is observed in painting. As Patricia Mainardi has discussed in her Husbands, Wives, and Lovers, adultery themes found their way into nineteenth-century French painting, but were “mediated, sometimes even obfuscated, by classical or literary references,” with the effect of attenuating painting’s relation to social history. Classicists such as Ingres, who was married for fifty years, chose “moral themes redolent of the exemplum virtutis” and themes where “no adultery actually took place” (Phaedra and Hippolytus, Antiochus and Stratonice, Paolo and Francesca), but Romantics such as Delacroix, a lifelong bachelor, openly acknowledged “this taboo subject and even dwelt on its unpleasant consequences.”50 In history painting, marital topics could also take an autobiographical meaning: in her analysis, Mainardi uncovers the autobiographical relevance of the Byronic theme of Mazeppa in the work of Géricault, where the image constructs the unhappy circumstances of the painter’s illicit relationship with his aunt Alexandrine Caruel. Delacroix treated the same subject in relation to his love affair with the mistress of a friend.51 To return to Degas, in The Daughter of Jephthah, Semiramis building Babylon and Scene of war in the Middle Ages the bachelor, the social exception in nineteenth-century bourgeois France, adopts the mask of a heroic female whose marital status is peculiar: these great spinsters embody the incompatibility of marriage and artistic vocation as well as the transgression of the social rule.52 In The Daughter of Jephthah, the sense of the story is in the virgin, who stands out as the victim as much as the agent of the victory: the life of the senses must be sacrificed to divine designs. Similarly, for Degas, the genuine artist will relinquish such social customs as marriage to pursue his or her vocation. For his picture of the warrior-goddess Semiramis (Fig. 3-7), city founder and queen of Babylon, Degas found his literary source in Book II of Diodorus Siculus’s Biblioteca Historica. Semiramis, a semi-goddess, is abandoned by her mother and cared for by doves until she is adopted by Simmas, the shepherd of the King’s flock. One day, Onnes, a member of the royal council, notices the girl and, struck by her beauty and other qualities, decides to marry her. They have children. The events take place during the reign of King Ninos, intent on the conquest of the whole of Asia. After seventeen years of successful war campaigns, the royal army arrives in the Bactrian. The siege of the city of Bactres proves so long that Onnes decides to call for Semiramis to join him. She departs on a long journey from her native Assyria, dressed to look like a young man, as we read in Diodorus. Once in the Bactrian, during her observation of the siege, she

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Fig. 3-7 Semiramis Building Babylon, c.1860-62, oil on canvas, cm 150 x 258, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

notices that all military actions take place on the plains, with no attempt made to conquer the fortified acropolis of Bactres. So she takes soldiers and she scales the walls to take the acropolis. Impressed by the courage of the woman, the King falls in love with Semiramis, and forces Onnes to commit suicide. Semiramis becomes queen but soon King Ninos dies, leaving her to reign in glory. She assembles architects and two million men in order to found Babylon, a city of magnificent palaces, temples, statues, gardens, and bridges, protected by triple fortifications. Semiramis, a warrior queen, lives luxuriously in splendid palaces and refuses to marry, “fearing she might be deprived of her power.”53 She prefers the company of soldiers, whom she subsequently dispatches to death. This is the queen that Degas imagines overlooking the city she has created from the heights of her palace: she is surrounded by attendants in a variety of dress and with different hairstyles, and is followed by a horse drawing a chariot, an eclectic synthesis of Italian, Greek and, above all, Persian, Assyrian and Indian motifs from art he had seen in the Louvre and in books.54

4. Mademoiselle d’ Orléans The so-called Scene of War in the Middle Ages (Fig. 3-8) is related to Degas’s other history paintings. Considered cryptic by most scholars, this piece of historical genre may in fact represent Mademoiselle d’Orléans, also known as Mademoiselle de Montpensier. The unmarriageable Mademoiselle

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d’Orléans, frondeuse, amazone and autobiographer, would fit comfortably alongside Semiramis and Jephthah’s daughter as an exemplary life that Degas appropriated as an alter ego for the artist as exceptional being. The work, painted about 1863, is known by more than one title. In French it is known as either Les Malheurs de la ville d’Orléans, Les Malheurs de la Nouvelle Orléans, or Scène de guerre au moyen âge. In English, the work is called either Scene of War in the Middle-Ages, The Misfortunes of the city of Orleans or Archers and young girls (Scene from the Hundred Years’ War). The two titles that most often appear in the literature are Scène de guerre au moyen âge, under which the picture was exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon, and Les Malheurs de la ville d’Orléans, a title that was described as “erroneous” in the catalogue of the 1988 Degas exhibition. How did the various titles arise? The painting figures under n° 124 in Lemoisne’s catalogue of Degas’s works.55 It is signed Ed. De Gas on the lower right-hand side, and consists of pieces of paper painted à l’essence, joined and mounted on canvas. Degas executed many preparatory drawings for the work and an oil study, conserved at the Département des Arts Graphiques of the Musée du Louvre. The painting was shown once during Degas’s lifetime, at the 1865 Paris Salon, where it was mistakenly given as a pastel, and subsequently remained in the artist’s studio, where it was found at his death, in September 1917. There is another first-hand indication of a title for this painting. On 16 January 1881, during a discussion about Degas, Emile Durand-Gréville told Jean-Jacques Henner, Berthon, and Alidor Delzant that a few days earlier he had seen, presumably in Degas’s studio, “les dessins des Jeunes Spartiates, des Horreurs de la Guerre et de la Sémiramis fondant Babylone.”56 Degas may have designated his work as the Horreurs de la guerre. The work figured in the catalogue of the posthumous sale of the contents of Degas’s atelier under the title Les Malheurs de la ville d’Orléans, by which it also appeared in 1924 at the Galerie Georges Petit, before its acquisition by the French State for the Musée du Luxembourg in 1947. Pierre Cabanne was the first writer to address the mismatch of the picture’s titles and subject. His research into the history of the city of Orléans, however, failed to identify any historical events that could be regarded as ”malheurs,” with the exception of the Norman invasion of the ninth century and the 1428-29 siege of Orléans by the English, events which presented no episodes that could correspond to the painting. Cabanne concluded that, if the painting did refer to an episode of the history of Orléans, it could be considered as homage to the native city of René-Hilaire Degas, the artist’s grandfather.57

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For Hélène Adhémar, the scene is an evocation of the tragic days lived by the women of New Orleans during the American Civil War. This historical circumstance did affect Degas’s maternal family, who were from New Orleans. In November 1862, Degas’s uncle, Michel Musson, sent his wife and three daughters to safety in France, after General Butler had taken New Orleans on 1 May. For Adhémar, the tales of the American atrocities told by his relatives (who stayed in France until the spring of 1865) would explain the painting, but not wishing to recall these episodes directly, Degas decided to transform the Malheurs de la Nouvelle Orléans into a medieval scene. According to Adhémar, the title Les Malheurs de la ville d’Orléans, given in 1918 on the occasion of the sale of the contents of Degas’s atelier, was a result of the misreading of a source that no longer exists: “A list or document must have said: Les Malheurs de la Nlle Orléans: “nouvelle” shortened, as sometimes Degas used to write it, would have read “Ville”.” The title Les Malheurs de la ville d’Orléans came to be attached to the painting instead of Les Malheurs de la Nlle Orléans.58 The authors of the 1988 catalogue of the Degas exhibition held in Paris, New York, and Ottawa suggest that no one really knows how the painting came by this title. For these writers the work is not a history painting proper, but an allegory in the tradition of enigmatic Renaissance paintings for which “Degas did not do any special research.” The authors also noted “many anachronisms in the picture.”59 However, it is unlikely that Degas would not have done any special research for a history painting destined for the Salon.60 Furthermore, in the academic theory of art, the essence of the Grand Style of history painting consisted in the painter’s ability to recreate the historical facts and characters not literally but though an act of poetic interpretation, according to Horace’s ut pictura poesis.61 It is also useful to point out that the Scene of war in the Middle Ages is not exactly a history painting, but a piece of historical genre. The difference between these two genres in the hierarchy of the genres in nineteenthcentury France has been usefully articulated: Unlike history painting, which sought to represent a morally elevating theme drawn from the Bible, mythology, or the classical past - and as such transcend the particular in order to arrive at a more ideal notion of the historical truth - historical genre focused on the incidental, the particular and the private.62

The Mémoires of Mademoiselle d’Orléans could be the literary source for the subject matter of Degas’s painting, that is, “les malheurs de Mademoiselle d’Orléans.”63 The painting presents an incidental, particular

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and private subject. When compared to The Daughter of Jephthah, in which the action depicted is as clearly defined as it is in the Bible, Degas’s Scene of War in the Middle Ages is an impure image that, because it transcends the boundaries of the genres, appears like an “episode.” It is a “textual image.”64 In his painting, I suggest, Degas presents another extraordinary and unmarriageable woman: Mademoiselle d’Orléans, heroine and amazone, in an undistinguished moment of the civil war that agitated France during the Fronde des Princes, in 1652. For loyalty to her father Gaston d’Orléans, she joined the war against Louis XIV on the side of such aristocrat rebels against the crown as Condé, Chevreuse, Retz, La Rochefoucauld, Beaufort, as well as their wives, amazones such as the Princesse de Condé and the Duchesse de Chevreuse. Degas was well acquainted with seventeenth-century French history and the history of the royal house of the Orléans, who were the French patrons of Anthony van Dyck, a painter he revered. In the spring of 1859, on his way back to France after three years in Italy, Degas stopped at Genoa, and then Turin.

Fig. 3-8 Scene of War in the Middle Ages, 1863-65, essence on paper mounted on canvas, cm 83 x 145, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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Fig. 3-9 Charles Dauphin, The Massacre of the Niobids, oil on canvas, cm 213 x 350, Galleria Sabauda, Turin.

A few days later, in Paris, Degas would describe in a letter to Moreau the highlights of his journey. In Genoa, at Palazzo Brignole, he had seen “les beaux Van Dyck.” At Turin, he had first visited Palazzo Madama and then the Castello del Valentino: built by Christine de France, widow of Victor Amédée I, daughter of Henri IV and Marie de’ Medici. It sits among trees, all alone. Tell me if it is not the palace of a widow, sad after a brilliant youth, looking at the Alps covered with snows that separate her from France. I had sat on the grass, quite tired from running around the town all morning, and I had fallen in this daydreaming that you know. I have to say that the place was conducive to it.65

The French princess about whom Degas daydreamed so romantically was Madame Royale, Christine de France, who had married Victor Emmanuel Duke of Savoy.66 Christine was the aunt of Mademoiselle d’Orléans, a piece of knowledge that would not have escaped Degas and which would help to contextualise Degas’s choice of an episode from the life of Mademoiselle d’Orléans as the subject-matter for the so-called Scene of war in the Middle Ages. The painting is full of references to Degas’s travels across Piedmont. For his depiction of Mademoiselle d’Orléans at war, Degas found inspiration in a large painting he must have seen at Palazzo Madama: Charles Dauphin’s The Massacre of the Niobids (Fig. 39) which then adorned the entrance hall of the Pinacoteca Reale.67 This

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painting may have inspired Degas in both the use of the horizontal format and the overall composition in the disposition of the figures: in both works, the victims appear by the tree on the left, while bodies are strewn in the foreground. For the naked body on the right, Degas borrowed Dauphin’s motif of the fallen Niobid on the left with his left arm outstretched over the corpse of his brother clothed in red. Degas also took Dauphin’s horse-rider galloping on the right and the central figure of the shooting Apollo, who has become Degas’s Artemis, Mademoiselle d’Orléans. But why is Mademoiselle shooting at women like herself? This cruel detail has nothing enigmatic or contradictory if we keep in mind that in his piece of historical genre, Degas, through the citation of Charles Dauphin, has suggestively introduced a clear mythological reference to Artemis, the goddess of chastity. As Degas knew, essential to the identity of Artemis the virgin huntress, whose companionship is confined to nymphs, is the fact that she punished brutally the men as well as the women who transgressed the vows of chastity that bound them to her.68 In his drawings, Degas used both male and female models for the naked figure lying on the foreground to the right-hand side, as well as for the archer in yellow. In nineteenth-century historiography, Mademoiselle d’Orléans was a well-known name. A version of her Mémoires was published in Paris in 1838. King Louis Philippe commissioned many portraits, or copies of portraits, of Mademoiselle for the Musée Historique at Versailles.69 In March 1851, one of Sainte-Beuve’s Lundis in Le Constitutionnel featured a literary portrait of la Grande Mademoiselle, which was subsequently republished in 1862 in the thirteen-volume collection of the Causeries du lundi.70 In 1858-59 Charpentier published a version of Mademoiselle’s Mémoires faithful to the seventeenth-century original, in four volumes edited by Pierre-Adolphe Chéruel.71 Furthermore, the Grande Mademoiselle appears vividly in Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Du Dandysme et Georges Brummell (1845, then republished in 1861 and 1879), as the proud marblehearted Bourbon princess who is amazed to find herself falling in love with a social inferior, Lauzun, a selfish “Dandy d’avant les Dandys.” For Barbey, whose Byronism inspired Degas, the Mémoires were “adorable pages” worthy of a novel by Stendhal.72 Mademoiselle’s Mémoires may have been seen and read by Degas, and there is no doubt that he would have been familiar with the iconography of the Grande Mademoiselle, from both the printed portraits of her conserved at the Cabinet des Estampes and from such works as Jean Nocret’s Allegorical Portrait of the Royal Family (1670) in the Salon de l’Oeil de Boeuf at Versailles or Pierre

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Bourguignon’s Portrait of Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans Holding the Portrait of Her Father (1671-2). The Scene of war in the Middle Ages, consistently with the subject of the other history paintings by Degas of the early 1860s, shows an exceptional and unmarriageable woman. The archer dressed in yellow and wearing a plumed hat may well represent Mademoiselle d’Orléans, amazone, frondeuse, and précieuse who took part in the enlightened salons of Madame de Rambouillet and Madeleine de Scudéry. Banned from the court of Louis XIV for her activity in the Fronde, Mademoiselle d’Orléans retired in exile to Saint-Fargeau, where she began work on her Mémoires. Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, born in Paris in 1627, was the daughter of Monsieur, Louis XIII’s brother Gaston, Fils de France and Duc d’Orléans, and his first wife Marie de Bourbon, Duchesse de Montpensier, who, by dying after giving birth, left la Grande Mademoiselle as the richest heiress in France.73 If the rank and wealth of this princess of the blood destined her for the throne, the result of the circumstances was that Mademoiselle never married. Brought up to believe that she would marry a great prince by virtue of her birth, Mademoiselle had to come to terms with the failure of such expectations.74 The failure of her plans to marry was a source of bitterness and frustration, the malheurs at the origin of the writings that made her one of the most important mémorialistes of the seventeenth century. Mademoiselle’s Mémoires are among the earliest autobiographical accounts in Western literature. However, the aspect that would have caught Degas’s attention in Mademoiselle’s story would have been her disdain of love. Mademoiselle was not entirely a victim of Louis XIV and Mazarin’s despotic machinations not to marry her.75 Fed as she was “à l’école de Corneille,” Mademoiselle, disdained love, a passion for petty people, placed “in the second rank, after the male passions, ambition, vengeance, pride of blood, “ glory”.”76 Like Semiramis, Mademoiselle was a sexually ambiguous warrior. Mademoiselle is remembered for her military exploits in two episodes of the civil war that occurred during the Fronde: the expedition to, and taking of, Orléans in March 1652, and the battle of the Porte Saint-Antoine in Paris in July 1652. On this occasion, Mademoiselle d’Orléans ordered troops or, some say, proceeded herself to open fire on Louis XIV from the cannons of the Bastille. After this, marrying Louis XIV became impossible for her and she was exiled to Saint-Fargeau, her château in Burgundy, for five years.77 The four history paintings discussed here all demonstrate Degas’s view of the irreconcilable nature of marriage and artistic vocation, delivered by the painter through an original choice of subjects taken from a wide range of literary sources:

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from mythology and the scriptures, from Greek and French history. It is plausible that by her noble nature Mademoiselle d’Orléans was assigned a place in Degas’s gallery of femmes fortes who were intended to symbolise the exceptional modern artist. It is possible that there was another aspect of Mademoiselle’s exemplary life that would have seemed to Degas to be close to his own endeavour: Mademoiselle’s literary achievements, which would have been read as sympathetic to the rise of Realism in the concerns of artists and writers in mid-nineteenth-century France. As Marc Fumaroli has written, Mademoiselle’s account of her own malheurs hastened the end of the fashion for heroic novels and is at the origin of the modern novel.78 One also imagines that Mademoiselle’s account of “the images of things as one ordinarily sees them happen” could have prompted Degas’s decision to abandon history painting in favour of portraits and genre scenes. In that case, the Scene of War in the Middle Ages begs not to be dismissed as Degas’s strange and last history painting: it is, rather, an enactment of Degas’s advance into (the painting of) modern life. Rather than assuming Degas’s identity as that of a misogynist tout court, I have looked more closely at Degas’s masculine identity and at his early representations of women.79 The history paintings of the early 1860s constitute essential study material for a revision of the stereotypical image of Degas as a narrow-minded bourgeois and a misogynist. They throw a new light upon Degas’s artistic, sexual, and political identity, touching issues of modern notions of masculinity. Degas’s history paintings construct an autobiographical discourse on the unmarriageable modern artist, camouflaged as femme forte. Questions of women, love, and marriage in the painter’s biography are inescapable for scholars of Degas. His commitment to bachelorhood was not straightforward or devoid of uncertainty. A mostly illegible entry in a notebook used by the painter between April and May 1856 reads as follows: “I couldn’t say how much I love this girl since she has…Monday 7 April. I can’t refuse … to say how shameful ... a defenceless girl. But I’ll do that as little as possible.” This piece of evidence about the young Degas’s ability to conceive love or devotion for a woman remains difficult to contextualise, as it alludes to an incident of which we have no further detail. In the same notebook, however, Degas wrote: “the heart is an instrument that rusts if it doesn’t work. Can one be an artist without a heart?”80 The latter statement presents to us an image of Degas meditating on the complications of love in an artist’s life. His commitment to bachelorhood must have grown with his commitment to art, but Degas need not be consistent on the subject. It is my argument that Degas’s commitment to bachelorhood underpins his history paintings of 1859-65. However, from his letters, Degas appears

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undecided about marriage throughout his life: he could define himself as a “célibataire incorrigible,” as well as find himself “meditating on the state of celibacy, and a good three quarters of what I tell myself is sad,” as he wrote to Henri Rouart in 1896.81 There is no inconsistency between Degas defining himself as an incorrigible bachelor and Degas making a point of the sadness of bachelorhood: melancholy is “necessary” in the mise en scène of the modernist bachelor artist, functioning as “a self-defining sense of pervasive loss coupled with a refusal to recognize that loss.”82 Degas’s ambivalent thoughts on marriage, passed on to his acquaintances, could serve a self-fashioning purpose of building the reputation of an artist torn by the life or art dilemma. Ambroise Vollard relates that Degas had told him: “Vollard, you have to get married. You don’t know what solitude is when one ages.” But asked why he had not married himself, Degas replied: “Oh! me! It’s not the same thing. I was too afraid, when I had finished a painting, of hearing my wife telling me: “it’s really pretty what you have done there”.”.83 While Degas’s famous anecdote, pertinently, comes directly from Charles Demailly, the story is an instance of the “necessary melancholy” in the modernist bachelor’s narrative, whereby the artist “is promoting the institution of marriage while avoiding it himself.”84 Degas’s aversion to marriage was not founded on misogyny. It stemmed instead from practical considerations on the nature of marriage in French society, which assigned to women a predominant role in domestic life.85 What Degas did not wish to confront was precisely a traditional category of power, the family, and the wife it entailed, and that in his view threatened the artist’s identity and the very space of his work.86 By choosing artistic bachelorhood, Degas was taking a marginal position in his times; he was taking a “conduite d’avant-garde” adopted by such writers and artists as Flaubert and the Goncourts, as well as by such marginal characters as dandies, bohemians and vagabonds. Degas was neither a misogynist nor a narrow-minded bourgeois. Quite the contrary: by choosing a life centred on urban sociability and refusal of property, a life, that is, morally and materially at the margins of a bourgeois society based on the familial institution, Degas lived a “contre-modèle de la vie privée bourgeoise.”87

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Notes 1

Fromentin was a friend of Moreau, to whom Degas wrote: “Fromentin a presque les honneurs de l’exposition, à mon avis. Malheureusement quand il veut serrer un peu son exécution il l’alourdit. Il a une danse de bateleurs nègres dans une tribu, et une lisière d’oasis pendant le sirocco qui sont deux chefs-d’œuvres, tout paraît sauce rosse à coté.Ý : Letter 225, in Capodieci, 2002, pp. 504-6. Before signing, Degas closed the letter with a last line about his old teacher: “Lamothe est plus idiot que jamais.” 2 See Notebook 13, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 78-83 and Notebook 18, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 92-102. 3 See Notebook 14, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 83-5. 4 See Notebook 16, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 89-91. Also see Reff, Three Great Draftsmen in Reff, 1976 a, pp. 57-89. 5 In April 1859, prince Soutzo even offered his little flat “in a decently looking house.” Soutzo described the place to Auguste as totally independent, clean, and quiet. He offered that while he was in the countryside Edgar could have it, if he liked, as it was, furnished: two small rooms, a little kitchen, a stove, a chest of drawers, table and chairs and an “excellent bed.” As Soutzo added, “aucun luxe, mais le stricte nécessaire.” 6 It is useful here to recall a few notions of Parisian artistic geography. When Napoleon, in 1808, dislodged the artists from the Louvre palace, which had been their residence for centuries, having to find a suitable working space became a concern for most artists. Some areas of Paris were favoured above others by artists in their choice of an atelier. In Napoleonic years, it was the Left Bank, as there were found the institutions presiding over artistic education: just over the river from the Louvre, stood the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Institut, while the Sorbonne, deconsecrated churches and convents also accommodated art studios. Later in the nineteenth century, another area on the Left Bank where studios were found was Montparnasse. Most Parisian artists lived on the Left Bank when in the 1820-30s the Nouvelle Athènes and its surroundings at the foot of the Montmartre hill began to attract artists. During the 1850s, a small number of artists lived on the quiet Ile Saint-Louis, where the Club des Hachichins met at the first floor of the hôtel Pimodan, at 13 quai d’Anjou. Baudelaire and Manet were part of this circle. A very small number of artists had official studios in the Louvre and in the Institut during the Second Empire (one of these was Degas’s future friend, LudovicNapoléon Lepic): see Lethève, 1968b, and Milner, 1988. 7 In his letter of 27 November 1858 from Florence to Gustave Moreau in Rome, Degas wrote: “Je suis occupé d’un portrait de ma tante et de mes deux petites cousines. Je vous montrerai cela à votre retour. Je le fais comme si je faisais un tableau; il le faut bien, je veux laisser ce souvenir et j’ai une envie désordonnée de couvrir des toiles, de sorte que je ramène tout au tableau, qui est un rêve bien pardonnable à un enfant comme vous m’appelez. J’ai dû laisser les études que je faisais au musée, et je ne bouge plus de la maison; seulement une fois à Paris je me

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promets de ne plus sacrifier comme ici à la famille.”: in Capodieci, 2002, pp. 46265. 8 Gennaro died in 1864. Degas finally gave the portrait to his aunt. 9 In Capodieci, 2002, pp. 462-65. 10 See Degas, 1988, pp. 77-82; Jamot, 1924 and Finsen, 1983. Also, Nicholas Penny has defined this as “the first European portrait designed to reveal the tensions within a family”: Penny, 2013. 11 See Degas, 1988, p. 118. 12 A version of this study has been previously published: Crisci-Richardson, 2012. 13 This is in keeping with Mary Sheriff’s argument that “the exceptional woman is a traditional discourse of masculinist discourse, tolerated, even admired in her originality.” The term “exceptional woman” points in two directions: “first, toward the exceptional person-that individual who achieved something considered out of the ordinary, an individual whose success historians or contemporaries valorized. And second, toward the exceptional woman – that woman whose achievement required a dispensation from and strengthening of the laws that regulated other women.”: Sheriff, 1996, p. 2. 14 Segond, 1928, pp. 225-7. 15 Degas noted: “Un ciel gris et bleu d’une valeur telle que les clairs s’enlèvent en clair et les ombres en noir naturellement. Pour le rouge de la robe de Jephté, me rappeler les tons orangés rouges du vieillard dans le tableau de Delacroix. La colline avec ses tons mornes et glauques. Sacrifier beaucoup le paysage comme taches. Quelques têtes levées en profil et ardentes derrières Jephté. Purée de pois grisâtre avec ceinture blanc sale rayé et voile bleu ardoise rosé. ” : Notebook 15, in Reff b, 1976, vol. 1, pp. 87-9. 16 Notebook 19, in Reff b, vol. 1, pp. 102-7 and “The Artist and the Writer,” in Reff a, 1976, pp. 147-99. 17 Loyrette, 1984, pp. 150-57. 18 Vigny, 1950, pp. 2-4. 19 Moore, 1958, pp. 301- 4. 20 On the Judaic view of celibacy, see Abbott, 2000, pp. 192-3. 21 Notebook 6, in Reff b, vol. 1, pp. 49-53. 22 Notebook 12, in Reff b, vol. 1, pp. 73-8. 23 At the Art Institute of Chicago. 24 Martha Lucy has discussed the reworking of the canvas and observed that sometime after 1879, Degas removed the classicising architecture from the middle background of the composition (which we see in the study for the Young Spartans at the Art Institute of Chicago) and painted over the profiles of the figures, erasing their idealised heads to give them what Lucy terms animal and aggressively bestial features and poses. For Lucy, “the body itself can be understood as the painting’s subject.” This body is jeopardised in its status by modern evolutionary Darwinian discourse, by means of which Degas displaces “the ideal with an evolutionary, and altogether modern, body.”: Lucy, 2003, pp. 1-17.

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25 See the detailed discussion of the work in Bomford, Herring, Kirby, Riopelle and Roy, 2004, pp. 68-81. Also see Notebook 18, in Reff b, vol. 1, pp. 92-102 and Burnell, 1969. 26 Cooper, 1954, pp. 119-22. 27 Pool, 1964, pp. 306-11 and Salus, 1985, pp. 501-6. 28 Broude, 1988. pp. 640-59. 29 Nochlin and Salus, 1986, pp. 486-87. 30 Nochlin and Salus, 1986, pp. 486-87. 31 “Jeux, danses et esbatements, que faysoient les filles toutes nues en la présence des hommes : non point par contrainte de raisons géometriques, comme dit Platon, mais par attraicts d’amour. ” I rely here on Jacques Amyot’s version of Plutarch’s Les Vies des hommes illustres de Plutarque, Paris, n.d., pp. 233-34, in my translation from the French. 32 “However, besides those attractions, he [Lycurgus] also established a mark of infamy to the address of those who did not want to marry because they were not allowed to be in those places where these games and public pastimes were performed in the naked; furthermore, the officials of the town forced them to be in the vicinity of the square, naked in the middle of winter: and as they walked they had to sing a certain song made for them, which said in summary that they were being justly punished for not obeying the laws.”: Plutarch, n. d., pp. 233-4, in my translation. The admonition is also found in Les Dicts notables des Lacedémoniens, in the Moralia, which I have consulted in a reprint of Amyot’s 1571 translation: Amyot, 1971, pp. 209-29. 33 Cartledge, 2002, pp. 38-9; also see Licht, 1931, pp. 34-5 and pp. 115-16. 34 Borie, 1976, pp. 68-9. Bachelor taxes were also often advocated in Britain and America, on the grounds of the Spartan principle: Snyder, 1999, p. 4 and pp. 22-4. 35 See Borie, 1976, pp. 112-28. 36 See Martin-Fugier, 2007. 37 I am borrowing here Snyder’s words for Henry James, in Snyder, 1999, p. 106. 38 Goncourt, 1868, pp. 71-2. All quotes from the book are in my translation. 39 Goncourt, 1868, pp. 190-91. 40 Goncourt, 1868, p. 228. 41 Goncourt, 1865, p. 154. 42 Goncourt, 1865, p. 154. 43 Goncourt, 1865, p. 154. 44 Goncourt, 1865, p. 155. 45 Goncourt, 1865, p. 155. 46 Goncourt, 1865, pp. 154-55, p. 213. 47 Flaubert, 1951, p. 26. 48 Borie, 1976, pp. 23-4 and p. 27. 49 See Snyder, 1999, pp. 2-3. 50 Mainardi, 2003, p. 179. 51 Mainardi, 2003, pp. 179-81. 52 For a discussion of how, in nineteenth-century artistic and literary culture, transvestitism and other assertions of androgyny allowed authors of both genders

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to write more freely and escape the stereotypes see Germaine Greer’s “The Transvestite Poet”: Greer, 1995, pp. 65- 101. 53 Book II of Diodore de Sicile, 1991. 54 Notebook 18, in Reff b, 1976, vol. 1, pp. 92-102 and Monnier, 1978. 55 Lemoisne,1946. 56 Durand-Gréville, 1925, pp. 102-3. 57 Cabanne, 1962, pp. 363-66. 58 Adhémar, 1967. 59 For instance, the men-at-arms wear costumes that can be dated about 1470, “riding stirrup-less horses whose harnesses are barely sketched in, and are using fanciful bows (the bows of that time actually measured about six feet, or nearly two meters, and could not possibly have been used by men on horseback) to shoot their arrows at naked women in an indistinct, ravaged country setting with a vaguely Gothic church”: Degas, 1988, pp. 105-7. 60 We know some detail of what Degas read. Among the authors and works mentioned, cited or illustrated in Degas’s notebooks, one finds: Dante, Virgil, Plutarch, Poussin, George Sand, Charles Baudelaire, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Edmond de Goncourt, Brantôme, Torquato Tasso, Proudhon and many books on the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. Also see: Reff, 1976 a, pp. 147-99. 61 See Lee, 1940. 62 Duro, 2005, pp. 689-711. 63 The thread that should be reconsidered here is Adhémar’s suggestion that the title Les Malheurs de la ville d’Orléans is due to a misreading of Les Malheurs de la Nlle Orléans. Adhémar reasoned that the title must have figured on a list or document that existed and is now lost, and that the misreading may have originated from Degas’s frequent shortening of the word Nouvelle, for which Nlle was read Ville. Adhémar rightly supposed the existence of a document indicating that title for the painting. How else could the title have originated if not from a first-hand source, perhaps a list or inventory found in Degas’s atelier, or compiled in Degas’s company or following Degas’s hint in conversation about the painting? Such a document no longer exists or has not been found. It is possible, though, that the paper may have read “Les Malheurs de Mlle d’Orléans” and that this title was misread and printed in 1918 as Les Malheurs de la Ville d’Orléans, then readjusted in 1967 by Adhémar to Les Malheurs de la Nlle Orléans. The hypothesis of a firsthand source reading “Les Malheurs de Mlle d’Orléans” where Mlle d’Orléans stands for Mademoiselle d’Orléans, would explain both the appearance of the title and the subject of the painting. 64 Duro writes that “whereas history painting renders text into image, historical genre reverses this direction to create a textual image,” that is, “a narrative that is little more (and sometimes less), than a pictorial representation of an event (whether fact or fiction matters not at all).” While “both offer human action as the basis of their primary narratives (unlike, obviously, still life or landscape),” in their different approach to the representation of history, history painting will find its istoria, a plot-driven “mimesis of poetry,” in the Bible, in ancient history, and

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mythology, while the historical genre will find its themes in anecdotic, eventdriven narratives: Duro, 2005, pp. 689-711. 65 “ … bâti par Christine de France, veuve de Victor Amédée Ier, fille d’Henri IV et de Marie de’ Médicis. Il est au milieu d’arbres, tout seul. Dites-moi si ce n’est pas le palais d’une veuve, triste après une brillante jeunesse regardant souvent les Alpes pleines de neige qui la séparent de la France. Je m’étais assis sur l’herbe, assez fatigué de courir depuis le matin à travers la ville, et j’étais tombé dans ces rêvasseries que vous savez. Il faut dire que les lieux y portaient bien. ”: Letter 225, in Capodieci, 2002, pp. 504-6. 66 On Christine de France see Gelsomina Spione, “La Culture figurative à Turin, de la régence de Christine de France au règne de Victor-Amédée II”, in Spantigati, 2009, pp. 60-5. 67 See on Charles Dauphin: Michela di Macco, “Charles Dauphin in Piemonte,” in Macchioni, 1984, pp. 323-41. 68 See on Artemis: March, 2008, pp. 84-9. 69 See the portraits of Mademoiselle by Joseph Albrier (1838), Jean-François Alluys (1835), Auguste de Creuse (1839), Pierre Poisson III (1840) and Jean-Pierre Franque (1838). 70 Sainte-Beuve, 1851-62, vol. 3, pp. 503-25. 71 A detailed discussion of the versions and editions of the Mémoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier is found in Cholakian, 1986. 72 Barbey d’Aurevilly, 1879, p. 98 and p. 100, and see pp. 97-125. 73 Montpensier, 1858-59, vol. 1, p. 2. 74 Of all the many prospects of marriage Mademoiselle was presented with, some of which were only the product of her own imagination, none was ever realised: the Comte de Soissons, her cousin Louis XIV, Philip IV King of Spain, the Emperor Ferdinand III, the latter’s brother the archduke Leopold, the Grand Condé, the Elector of Bavaria, the Prince of Wales and future Charles II, Alphonse V the mad King of Portugal and Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, all were at some point considered as suitable pretenders to Mademoiselle’s hand, but the marriage simply did not happen, either refused by her in her actual wish to marry her cousin Louis XIV or forbidden by Louis XIV. When Mademoiselle finally fell in love with the Comte de Lauzun, Louis XIV did not approve the marriage. See Barine, 1901. 75 Her marriage was opposed on the ground that her wealth and rank would have turned her spouse into a threat to the French monarchy. 76 Barine, 1901, p. 162. 77 There she wrote the first part of her Mémoires. She went back to court in 1657. Later she returned to the second part of her Mémoires, the third part of which was written in 1689-90. She died in 1696. 78 Fumaroli, 1998, pp. 209-10. 79 In this I follow Robert Nye, where he invites us to consider not only the truth that historically “men have imposed various forms of subjugation on women,” but the truth that in the history of men’s experience this “familial and amatory regime that has brought suffering to women” also implied ideal and perverse prescriptions

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and constructions of manliness and masculine identity and sexuality. If women’s roles were confined to the domestic sphere, men’s roles were equally confined to the public sphere and to rooted prescriptions and constructions around virility, which served the same social and political institutions. See Nye, 1993, p. 12. 80 Notebook 6, in Reff b, 1976, vol.1, pp. 49-53. 81 Degas, 1947, p. 197. 82 See Snyder, 1999, p. 174. 83 Vollard, 1938, p. 118. 84 Snyder, 1999, p. 181. 85 See Michelle Perrot: “Figures et rôles,”, in Ariès and Duby, 1987, vol. 4, pp. 121-85; Anne Martin-Fugier, “Les rites de la vie privée bourgeoise,” in Ariès and Duby, 1987, vol. 4, pp. 193-261. 86 Vollard reports that one day Degas and he were commenting on Edouard Manet’s Execution of Maximilian, of which Degas had just bought a fragment at auction. Degas exclaimed: “What a pity, can you believe it? They dared to cut this painting! It is the family that did this! Never get married … I have found this fragment but where are all the other pieces?” The Execution of Maximilian had probably been cut into pieces by Manet himself. He often cut up paintings to render them more suitable to his taste. For instance, Manet cut up the double portrait of himself and his wife Suzanne that Degas had painted and given to him. Manet did so because he did not like the likeness of Suzanne. For this habit, Degas termed him “cet animal.” Vollard, 1938, p. 123. 87 Michelle Perrot’s words, “En marge: célibataires et solitaires,” in Ariès and Duby, 1987, vol. 4, pp. 287-303.

CHAPTER FOUR NORMANDISM

1. Horse-racing This chapter is about Degas’s Norman themes (horse races, seascapes, and beach scenes) and their Anglophilia, that is, about Degas’s Normandy as the space of a modern, progressive, and positivist attitude, marking Degas’s republicanism of the 1860s. In the autumn of 1861 Degas spent the first of many vacations in Normandy at the Ménil-Hubert, the château of his friends Paul and Claire Valpinçon.1 The château was located near Exmes, in the Orne district. A land of woods, streams, medieval villages, and centuries-old fairs, with its Gothic cathedrals, ruins of fortresses, castles, and abbeys, Normandy told a story of primitive charm, that of Gallia Christiana, or, Anglo-Norman France.2 Over the years Degas would come to know this corner of eastern Normandy well: in the Bocage normand, pierced by the river Orne, and described by the geographer Onésime Reclus in 1902 as “à la fois charmant par sa verdure et sévère par ses forêts, ses pierres sombres, ses schistes, ses granits, ses grès rouges et ce qui lui reste des dolmens et des menhirs,” lies Falaise, the birthplace of William the Conqueror, with the ruins of the castle of his father, Robert le Diable.3 A vision of Normandy as the Anglo-Norman world of cross-Channel Christian dukes and Kings was fed by the many medieval chronicles published in the nineteenth century. In both England and France appeared texts such as the Worcester Chronicle (1848-49) by William of Worcester, the Gesta Normannorum Ducum, by William of Jumièges, Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum (1870), William of Malmesbury’s De Gesta Regum Anglorum and Historia Novella.4 This Romantic vision was also embraced and propagated by learned societies, such as the Société historique et archéologique de l’Orne, which published its own Bulletin. Degas, of course, would have been aware of the history of the Norman conquest of England, and was familiar with Meyerbeer’s opera, Robert le Diable, a scene of which he painted in 1868. Not far from Falaise one finds Lisieux, with “the first Gothic church that was built in France,” and Argentan,

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reached by “a road through swaying uplands, where heather appears and sweet-scented pine here and there” as we read in Percy Dearmer’s Highways and Byways in Normandy (1900). At the racecourse in Argentan, scholars speculate that Degas might have attended a horse race that inspired At the Races (Fig. 4-1). From Argentan, one could go to Alençon and to “the villages of Exmes and Almenèches,” as Degas did.5 Alençon, the capital city in the Orne, was famous for the point de France, a traditional needlepoint lace of intricate vegetal motifs, which had always been praised or fashionable, except for a time under Marie Antoinette, who fancied a lighter and simpler lace.6 When, in the 1880s and 1890s, Degas collected such pieces of lace, and scoured the shops for handkerchiefs of Normandy to be displayed at his home in Paris, he was in the grip of a nostalgic idea of a past, moral France, and its genuine arts and crafts.7 Three decades earlier, in the 1860s, Normandy had meant for Degas the expression of liberal and progressive values through Anglophilia. While there is a remarkable difference in these attitudes, one progressive, the other conservative, both were modern positions in their own times and in both cases Normandy became the space of confluence of symbols and references revealing how much Degas was concerned with the appropriation of spaces and with their meanings. Such Norman artworks of Degas’s as the racecourse scenes with their bourgeois public, the landscapes, and the seascapes of the 1860s, are Anglophile in origin and essence, translating his espousal of the liberal values which were to a certain extent opposed to Napoleon III’s authoritarian rule. Napoleon III was himself an Anglophile, but it was in liberal London that the intellectuals who professed opposition to the Empire took refuge.8 In his assimilation of the themes and manner of treatment of the works of British sporting artists and of the modern French artists who worked in their wake, as well as of Courbet’s Norman works, in the 1860s Degas defined himself specifically through these Anglophile themes, embracing the idea that libertarian Britain provided the modern and bourgeois model of democracy. This would change with the French defeat in the FrancoPrussian war in 1870, the Commune, and the installation of the Third Republic: while French nationalism consolidated itself, Anglophilia would not disappear, but become for artists, and thinkers in general, a secondary issue, obscured by anti-German feelings.9 Degas eventually abandoned landscape and seascape painting in the style of Courbet and in the 1870s concentrated on the themes of theatre and dance, which responded explicitly to his notions of Frenchness and to his search for themes that conveyed his individual identity as a painter. He did execute a few horseracing scenes in the 1870s, centred on jockeys and horses in a suburban

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Fig. 4-1 At the Races, 1860-62, oil on canvas, cm 43.3 x 65.5, Kunstmuseum, Basel.

Fig. 4-2 The Gentlemen’s Races, 1862, reworked in 1882, oil on canvas, cm 48.5 x 61.5, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

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setting. In these, the theme of the thoroughbred horse (with that of the dancer) attracted Degas more as a Balzacian symbol for the modern, heroic artist, than as an incarnation of Anglophilia, which Degas never abandoned. Anglophilia underwent different phases as nationalistic issues more and more shaped political and social life in republican France. In the 1870s, Degas’s painting embraced the spirit of the early Third Republic, seeking to assert his identity as a French painter through such French subject matter as the Opera dancers, the Parisian laundresses, and caféconcert singers, just as the Third Republic was asserting the political emergence of France as a republican nation. His vision would change after that: distancing himself from what he saw as a politically and economically corrupt Third Republic, was an angry fin-de-siècle anarchist Degas, ranting against Jews and Protestants alike. In the 1870s, Degas’s close friendship with the Halévys meant that he was exposed to the intellectual concerns of this family of broad-minded Anglophiles: Louise Breguet, of a family of Calvinist watchmakers, was a passionate reader of English literature, and her husband Ludovic (whose parents had converted from Judaism to Christianity) was a liberal and Orleanist who praised constitutional monarchy rather than the violent revolutions and the inclination to tyranny in French history and politics. Favouring a construction of English history as a bloodless, stable, and tolerant evolution towards liberty and individualism was a current view since Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). It was a construction reiterated by historians along the nineteenth century, for instance in Lord Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James II (1849-55) and in J. R. Green’s Short History of the English People (1874). The Halévys, however, were not simply Anglophiles committed to English liberalism: Louise and Ludovic’s children, Elie (1870-1937) and Daniel (1872-1962), whom Degas knew from infancy, would be brilliant and engaged students at the Lycée Condorcet, where their teacher of English was Stéphane Mallarmé, and later philosophers and historians of England.10 Degas was part of the Halévy’s intellectual circle and we catch glimpses of their conversations in the journal Daniel kept between 1886 and 1940. In the 1860s, Degas was practising portraiture and self-portraiture as well as history painting. In this period painters who wanted to make a living in Paris had to prove their ability in as many pictorial genres as possible.11 Around the time of his 1861 visit to the Valpinçons in Normandy, Degas decided to start on a new genre: horse-racing scenes in the tradition of the British sporting artists and their French followers, such as Géricault. He had been studying horses for a long time now: in the notebooks Degas had been using since 1858 studies

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of horses appear from artworks by Géricault, including Le Giaour, as well as studies from a cast of Géricault’s statuette, Le Cheval écorché. There appear also numerous studies from the lithographs in Alfred de Dreux’s Scènes Equestres (1842) and Petites Scènes Equestres (1847).12 In 1861, Degas went to Normandy to observe horses training. Located close to château of the Valpinçons were the horse-breeding establishments of Haras-le-Pin and the racecourse of Argentan. Degas undoubtedly observed horses on the racetrack, but he sketched very little from the life. Moreover, no artwork of Degas can be said to account vividly for any experience of the racetrack he might have had in Normandy. According to some scholars, only one work of 1861-62, At the Races (Fig. 4-1), was probably painted by Degas after having actually seen a horse race at Argentan.13 Degas in Normandy was observing and studying the world of horseracing by training his memory on the motif. In other words, Degas was applying to his painting the “méthode de la mémoire pittoresque” taught in Paris by Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran.14 Back in Paris, Degas would paint his racecourse scenes evoking such memories, over which, however, the memory of artworks of the past would in most cases prevail. In the horseracing canvases of the 1860s, such as The Gentlemen’s Races (Fig. 42) and At the Races. The Start (1860-62, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard), which were reworked by Degas in the 1880s, the horse moves according to the conventional rocking-horse gallop and the profile or rear view of the horses which Degas had seen in the hunting scenes of Henry Alken and in J.F. Herring’s racing pictures,15 in Alfred de Dreux or in Géricault’s Derby at Epsom of 1824. In engaging with this new genre, Degas certainly had in mind Courbet’s Riderless Horse, which had been exhibited at the 1861 Paris Salon. At the time of his visit to Normandy in 1861 Degas made notes recording a walk in the countryside with Paul Valpinçon, to the Haras-du-Pin, to Exmes, and to Argentan, and then back to the château. As Degas wrote, it was all a novelty for him: he was startled by the greenery and by the wet, hilly, and grassy Norman landscape. This was “exactly England,” a country he had never seen, and that looked to him very different from the drier landscape of St-Valéry-sur-Somme, a village at the border with Flanders where his father used to take the family on holiday: Exactement l’Angleterre. Des herbages petits et grands, tous clos de haies, des sentiers humides, des mares, du vert et de la terre d’ombre. C’est nouveau tout à fait pour moi; car à St Valéry la campagne me semble être beaucoup moins grasse et touffue qu’ici. Monter, descendre continuellement sur des bosses vertes. Arrivé dans un chemin inondé à peu près. Un sentier cependant fermé sur l’escarpement. Je me rappelle ces fonds de tableaux du génie anglais, comme la Barrière ou l’ombre du

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cavalier, le loup et l’agneau, etc. Entièrement sous-bois. Traversé de petites fermes. Arrivé sur la propriété de Mr Leriche. En ce moment je lis Tom Jones et rien ne fait mieux un fond à tous ces personnages. Montée vers Exmes. C’est bien le type d’un bourg avec son église et ses maisons en briques. En bas herbages comme premier plan. Je pense à Mr Soutzo et à Corot. Eux seuls donneraient un peu d’intérêt à ce calme.16

Degas’s impressions, gathered during his Norman holiday of the autumn 1861, combine a descriptive mode translating his authentic surprise at the discovery of a landscape totally new to his eyes, and a preconceived idealisation of this geographical location, which he identified with his purely painterly and literary ideas of England. As in his father’s letters with travel suggestions taken from the articles in the Magasin Pittoresque, in Degas’s notes, symbolism, and urbanity resurfaced in the modern experience of the circulation of images. The image of Normandy as England was not Degas’s idea, but a commonplace of travel writing.17 Degas laconically ended his notes by stating that only two artists, Corot and Soutzo, would be able to confer some interest “to that calm.” The language of Degas’s writing shows how the spaces of reality and art were intertwined for the artist. The Norman paintings tell us that Degas’s sources of inspiration and motifs lay in reality as well as in art, and how for Degas spaces were symbolic as much as real. Normandy was both a real and a symbolic place in Degas’s geography, just as the Paris Opera would become in later years. In order to understand in what terms the space of Normandy appealed to Degas’s understanding and to that of his contemporaries, it helps to illustrate some of the ideas on which rested the image of Normandy in nineteenth-century France. A Romantic perception of Normandy was popularised by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s histoires normandes: satanic short novels such as L’Ensorcelée (1855), Le Chevalier Des Touches (1864), Un prêtre marié (1865), Les Diaboliques (1874), set in a misty, woody, landscape. Barbey, whom Zola had defined as “le catholique historique,” became known as “le Walter Scott normand.”18 In arthistorical discourse, Normandy and its cathedrals immediately call up the monuments of France deemed representative of the national past. However, there exists a work of art that more explicitly embodies, in different ways for different nations and at different historical times, the relevance of the Norman Conquest and its political and cultural implications all along French and European modern history. This work of art is the Bayeux Tapestry, a 68.46 m piece of embroidery also known in France as the tapisserie de la reine Mathilde, because it is believed to have been created by Queen Mathilda, the Conqueror’s wife, and her ladies. In

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The Bayeux Tapestry. The Life Story of a Masterpiece (2006), Carola Hicks explains how the Bayeux Tapestry, a French National Historical monument since 1840, has been used to serve different agendas of political propaganda. The interest of Hicks’s study lies firstly in its examination of the tragic outcomes that the symbolic role of Normandy in European cultural constructions has had in world history.19 Secondly, Hicks’s research provides a model of how the discourses of geography, history, and art history are essentially one and constitute one effective perspective. Just like the Bayeux Tapestry, Degas’s Norman subject matter, including his racecourse scenes and the landscapes and seascapes analysed below, emerges from the same cultural symbolism founded upon Normandy as a sensitive point in French and European political history, a point that determined Anglo-French relationship with its different phases of Anglomania or Anglophobia. This relationship runs Degas’s works as a subtext, expressing the most recent political messages of Second Empire Anglomania, encountered among French liberal intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century. They saw parliamentary England as a modern country, as a freer and more open society than the French one.20 Anglomania was also spread at the imperial court and among the wealthy bourgeois. Napoleon III is often described as having been his uncle’s unconvincing imitator, but he actually differentiated himself from Napoleon I in at least one characteristic: he was an Anglophile. For the Emperor, who saw the Bayeux Tapestry in 1858 with the Empress Eugénie, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Caen-Cherbourg railway line, Normandy and the Norman Conquest were a reminder to the world that France and England had a common aristocratic past. During the Second Empire, foreign policy laid great emphasis on collaboration between France and England, and especially in such circumstances as the Universal Exhibitions of 1855 and 1867.21 In Napoleon III’s idea, the 1867 exhibition was meant to celebrate international cooperation, progress, and social regeneration and all nations were to be represented by their commercial and cultural products, as one reads in the official guide to the show. But in such universal context, France and England, the guide stated, stood out like friendly rivals in a peaceful confrontation, where France “occupait depuis longtemps le premier rang dans l’art, dans la science pure” while England triumphed with its economic power: “L’exubérante puissance de son industrie, l’admirable et rapide utilisation de ses produits offraient aux regards un exemple incomparable.” Each nation had to learn from the other in the 1867 Universal Exhibition, which made a point of exhibiting art and industry together, “véritable école de science et de goût pour le commerce et l’industrie.” The fine arts

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exhibition, “où s’expriment vivement les conceptions du beau,” was meant to benefit the masses and particularly the “producteur d’étoffes, de bijoux, de meubles artistiques,” while the fine arts would benefit from the example of the industrial products in terms of “nouveaux éléments d’inspiration et de travail.”22 As we know from the commentators of the time, the Parisian court and the wealthy French bourgeois lived according to the ideals and pastimes of the English, practising such sports as horsebreeding, hunting and horse racing, reading English novels, and adopting English style in dress. To sanction these new fashions, the British sporting picture painter Edwin Landseer had been awarded a gold medal at the 1855 Paris Universal Exhibition.23 The popularity of horseracing grew in parallel with the rising of the middle-class in Paris and was fostered by Napoleon III, and his half-brother Auguste, the Duc de Morny, President of the Legislative Assembly and art collector. Morny was behind the creation of the racetracks at Deauville (1864) in Normandy, and at Longchamp (1857) in the Bois de Boulogne, just outside Paris. Races were run, in emulation of the Derby at Epsom and Ascot, and a betting system was developed, with competition for rich prizes. The steeplechase also became popular, with many racecourses in Normandy and Brittany and three other racecourses around Paris: Vincennes (1863) La Marche (1867) and Auteuil, which opened in 1873 to host the first Grand Steeple-Chase de France.24 Degas’s early horse-racing paintings belong to this culture of French Anglomania.25 In his horse-racing scenes, Degas combined his citations of motifs from past art with his memories of the presence of the fashionable public, the carriages, and the jockeys in their attire, translating the fabrics and details of dress into patches of bright colours. In some cases, the artwork is as much landscape as study of dress code, as in Leaving for the Hunt of 1863-65 (in a private collection) showing horse riders in top hat and red riding coat, waiting to depart for the hunt. Scholars have been wondering whether this canvas, reworked by Degas in the early 1870s, represents a French hunt, inspired by similar subjects treated by Courbet and Alfred de Dreux, or an English fox hunt (as the top hats worn by the horse-riders would suggest) which Degas, according to some writers, may have seen in England during one of his short visits in the 1870s.26 But the work, in its realism, clearly combines all these disparate elements from memory. In a drawing of 1873, Rider in a Red Coat Viewed from Behind (at the Musée du Louvre) Degas repeated the motif of the horse rider seen from behind on the left hand side of Leaving for the Hunt, showing the Master of the Hunt in the act of raising his top hat. The drawing is monumental and concisely modern in the combination of black outlines and brilliant accords in the vividness of the

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Fig. 4-3 Scene from The Steeplechase. The Fallen Jockey, 1866 (reworked 1880 and 1897), oil on canvas, cm 180 x 152, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

red riding coat, and in the gold and black of the boot mirroring the gold and black in the hair and top hat of the rider, while the white of the trousers echoes the white touches of gouache around the rider’s torso. In 1866 Scene from the Steeplechase (Fig. 4-3) was shown at the Salon. In this large canvas, we see two horses leaping while the fallen jockey lies against a flat background of earth. The jockey’s pink jacket and beret echo the pink light of the sky in the upper part of the vertical composition. Besides quoting Delacroix’s Scene from the War between the Turks and the Greeks for the motif of the horse, The Steeplechase is Degas’s interpretation of the motif of the fallen jockey, common in English lithographs.27 This stiffly rendered scene, painted in the studio, is also close both to Courbet’s horse in the large Riderless Horse, one of four hunting scenes shown at the 1861 Paris Salon. At the 1866 Salon, the large painting was noticed and briefly, but favourably, commented upon by two critics, Edmond About and one anonymous writer.28

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6.5 x 55.9, Fig. 4-4 At tthe Races in thhe Countrysidee,1869, oil on ccanvas, cm 36 Museum of F Fine Arts, Bostoon.

At the Races in the Countryside C paainted in 18699 (Fig. 4-4), shows s the Valpinçons and their wett nurse in a caarriage, watchhed by their black dog. While they are recognissable, scholars are puzzledd by the factt that the countryside isn’t. The paainting combin nes a recollecction of an ou uting with the Valpinçoons at Argenttan with the co onventional m motif of a Holly family, and rear-vieewed or gallopping horses in n the distancee on the left-h hand side, all renderedd with the “poolish and care”” of Dutch paainting.29 Thee painting has the quallity of a collaage: against th he backgroundd of light-bluee sky and green land, stand out neeatly the brow wn, black, andd white masses of the horse-drawnn carriage wiith its passen ngers, filling the lower haalf of the painting on the right-handd side. Under an umbrella, the nurse hollds in her lap the littlee Henri, towarrds whom all the heads aree turned. Paul is sitting high in the front of the carriage, c his to op hat and hiss black dog riise above the horizon against the sky, s while horses and figur ures of disprop portioned heights dot the landscapee. In the whitee dress of the nurse, over which w fall the black riibbons of herr cap, we alrready find thhe colour com mbination typical of Degas’s dancerrs of the 1870ss. Around 1867-68 Mannet and Degaas attended att least one horse race together. Degas executeed various stu udies à l’esssence on oileed paper, including onne showing a woman at th he races, in ddiverse poses, some of which are heightened by white gouache (Déépartement des d Arts Graphiques,, Musée du Loouvre, Paris) and, in the saame techniquee, a study

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showing four rear views of a jockey mounting a horse that Degas has quickly sketched (The Art Institute, Chicago). At around this time, while Manet painted Races at Longchamp (1867, The Art Institute of Chicago), Degas executed The Parade. Racehorses before the Stands (Musée d’Orsay) and The False Start (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven).30 At the races, Degas also portrayed Manet, while according to Nils Sandblad Degas appears in profile in the right-hand corner of Manet’s Races at the Bois de Boulogne, of 1872, a possible allusion to the fact that Degas was behind Manet’s interest in painting horse-races.31 In the 1870s, before abandoning the subject until the 1880s, Degas painted Racehorses at Longchamp (1871) and Before the Race (1873), both at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. For Degas and Manet, as well as for many modern French artists, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, painting the race track and the attendant Anglomania not only expressed the modern in art, both in subject matter and technique. It also expressed Degas and Manet’s liberal aspirations and their view of England as a society of free citizens, and, by implication, as a land free from institutional control over artistic life, which seemed to offer artists greater opportunities than Paris. Indeed, for decades, English artists had been organising themselves in societies in order to challenge the monopoly of the Royal Academy; they had been organising their own Salon, and one-man shows held in the artists’ own studios, with admission fees.32 Delacroix and Géricault, among others, imitated their example, and French artists more and more sought every opportunity to establish fruitful working contacts over the Channel. As early as 1856, Alfred Stevens had worked in London, having received the commission for the tomb of the Duke of Wellington in St. Paul’s Cathedral.33 Alphonse Legros and Whistler settled there in 1859 and 1863, respectively, and those left in Paris planned trips to the English capital. In a letter from Boulogne-surmer of 29 July 1868, Manet invited Degas to join him and Stevens on a short trip to London, where Legros would be their guide and interpreter to “explore the terrain over there, since it could provide an outlet for our products.” Manet also asked Degas to try to persuade Fantin-Latour to go with him. Neither Degas nor Fantin-Latour would go to London that year, to Manet’s regret. Manet wrote to Fantin-Latour in August 1868: “But I believe there is something to be done over there; the feel of the place, the atmosphere, I liked it all and I’m going to try and show my work there next year, among other things you should exhibit my portrait, it would be good for both of us.”34 As for Degas, he visited London for the first time only in late 1871.35 There were aspects of English society that Degas (and others) did not like, such as the “reserve,” “coldness” and “conventional

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distrust” he felt in social exchange “on English territory, even at sea,” as Degas put it. For instance, in describing his “excellent journey” to America aboard the Cunard Scotia in a letter of 11 November 1872 from New Orleans to his friend Désiré Dihau, Degas wrote that it had taken ten days, “a long time; particularly on an English boat where there is so much reserve. If we could have taken the French boat of 10 October we should have found some traveling company in which the women at least would have helped us kill time.”36 Many French travellers shared Degas’s negative perception of English social skills and of Englishness as a “territory, even at sea”. Pissarro had expressed similar impressions of the “contempt, indifference, even rudeness” he felt in England in a letter to Duret, written from London, in June 1871. According to Claire Hancock’s Paris et Londres au XIXe siècle. Représentations dans les guides et récits de voyage (2003), Paris and London were perceived as territories by English and French travellers in the nineteenth century. Assuming as her parameters what she defines as the rhetoric of the closed and of the open space, she argues that London, an open, un-walled city, was nevertheless perceived as a closed city by French travellers, for whom closed doors marked closed spaces of a political and moral order characterised by such English “home” virtues as discretion and reserve. English travellers, instead, perceived Paris as the opposite moral and political space to London’s. In Paris, a fortified and monumental city, walls were everywhere, but in Paris the permeability of spaces reigned: citizens voiced their opinion in public spaces, and revolutions happened in streets. In the perception of the foreigner, the French were the people of exteriority and appearance, if not of impudence, and the Parisian space embodied this political and moral order of publicity.37 Well aware of his Frenchness, Degas continued to paint Anglophile horse-racing scenes until about 1878. Meanwhile, cultural internationalism, of which the Universal Exhibitions of 1855 and 1867 were an explicit instance, was undergoing a drastic change following the war between France and Prussia (JulySeptember 1870). With the defeat of France and the fall of the Second Empire, the political atmosphere in France changed drastically after 1871. The sharp increase of nationalism in French society and culture also found its way into the art world. As Charles Millard has written, Anglophile themes such as racecourse scenes became less favoured, while “fashionable taste turned toward theatre and the ballet, a eighteenth century art that was considered to be particularly French.” Degas, as well as many other artists, followed this trend “toward a pre-revolutionary nationalism.”38 Degas offers a remarkable instance of such nationalism in art. In a long letter written to James Tissot from New Orleans in February

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1873, Degas announced that he had begun a group portrait of cotton buyers in an office in New Orleans, intended for the London art dealer Agnew, who “should place it in Manchester: For if a spinner ever wished to find his painter he really ought to hit on me.” Degas had even targeted an English buyer: “In Manchester there is a wealthy spinner, de Cotterel, who has a famous picture gallery. A fellow like that would suit me and would suit Agnew even better. But let’s be cautious how we talk about it and not count our chickens too soon.” A few lines below, Degas reflected: If I could have another 20 years’ time to work I should do things that would endure. Am I to finish like that after racking my brains like one possessed and after having come so close to so many methods of seeing and acting well? No. Remember the art of Le Nain and all Medieval France. Our race will have something simple and bold to offer. The naturalist movement will draw in a manner worthy of the great schools and then its strength will be recognised. This English art that appeals so much to us often seems to be exploiting some trick. We can be better than they and be just as strong.

Degas concluded his letter with these words: “I feel that I am collecting myself and am glad of it. It took a long time, and if I could have Corot’s grand old age. But my vanity is positively American! Good health to you and some 900 pounds more. My brothers are well, their business too.”39 Degas wrote this despite the fact that his brothers’ business was on the brink of collapse, of which he was certainly aware. This letter is illuminating in various respects, both of Degas’s self-fashioning and of his symbolic geographic projections, as it shows how he conflated his selffashioning as an aggressively French painter with his Anglophilia and vision of Anglo-Saxon modernity, shifting between the praise of a winning model of rationalism and materialism and a desire to outdo English art by embracing the “simple and bold” French naturalism.

2. Norman landscapes In 1867 Degas visited the Paris Universal Exhibition and took note of the English painters and pictures that had struck him most. He made a long list, including William Inchbold’s Ile du Roi Arthur, James C. Hook’s Pêcheurs as well as his Sea Urchins, Charles Lewis’s Pièce d’Orge. Comté de Berkshire, John Raven’s The Crops Green, and Arthur Severn’s Waves by Moonlight. Degas also noted Alfred P. Newton’s The Approach of Winter, the watercolour Snowdon après le grêle by William H. Hunt and one by H. Brittan Willis, Harvest Scene in Sussex.40

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Fig. 4-5 Dead Fox in a Wood, 1867, oil on canvas, cm 92 x 73, Musée des BeauxArts, Rouen.

In the spring of 1867, one could see displayed in Paris all the possible versions of artistic modernity. Just outside of the great exhibition grounds, two pavilions appeared, housing the self-financed exhibitions of two Parisian artists of the avant-garde. One was a one-man exhibition of more than fifty paintings by Manet, which had opened on May 24. This was held in an elegant pavilion on the Place de l’Alma and was accompanied by a catalogue.41 It was probably at Manet’s show, or after visiting it, that Degas sketched in his notebook from La Femme au perroquet (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which inspired his own La Femme au peignoir rouge.42 A week later, Courbet’s one-man show opened close by, at the Rond Point de l’Alma. At the same time there was a retrospective exhibition of Ingres’s works at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Ingres having died that very year. One would think that Degas must have seen these exhibitions. In the case of the Ingres show, Degas recorded nothing in his notebooks and artworks. In the case of Courbet’s exhibition, Degas did see the landscapes, hunting scenes, and paysages de mer that prompted him to paint a few landscapes at Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, during his visit to Normandy that autumn. Bagnoles-de-l’Orne was a watering place located in the woody valley of the river Vée. As the geographer Reclus informs us, an alley of chestnut trees gave access to the spas, irrigated by three water sources, one of which was warm. Hotels and chalets for the bathers stood around the small lake formed by the Vée.43 To Bagnoles-del’Orne, wrote Dearmer in his 1900 guide of Normandy,

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At Bagnoles, in 1867, Degas executed two watercolours of rocks in a wood, and an oil painting, Dead Fox in a Wood (Fig. 4-5) echoing Courbet’s hunting scenes of shot animals, such as Fox in the Snow (1860, Dallas Museum of Art), destined for the English and German art markets.45 In Normandy, Degas could not help but see the landscape through his memory of Courbet’s paintings of the Jura Mountains, which were painted in the latter’s native Franche-Comté. Courbet’s Le Gour de Conche (1864, Musée d’Orsay) or La Roche Pourrie. Geological Study (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole) first exhibited in 1867, inspired Degas’s studies of rocks and landscapes: Degas adopted the Realist master’s compositional and pictorial arrangements, visible in the use of frontal views and in the characterisation of rocks and vegetation. Courbet’s landscape paintings were hugely successful, but were not necessarily painted for the Parisian market. They were carefully targeted at more sophisticated groups of art buyers, who “had different expectations when it came to landscape painting,” depending “on their social and geographic backgrounds and their knowledge of, and engagement with, nature (such as travel, sea-bathing, hunting or natural historical exploration),” as Doesschate Chu has argued against earlier art historians holding that Courbet’s production was an entirely commercial enterprise linked to the Parisian market. La Roche Pourrie. Geological Study, for instance, was painted for Jules Marcou, a geo-palaeontologist and fellow countryman of Courbet, and Le Gour de Conche for the industrialist Alfred Bouvet, also a native of Franche-Comté.46 Degas, however, was not blindly following Courbet, but absorbing his lesson in self-fashioning. In painting, Degas adopted Courbet’s themes and motifs, his earthy palette and pictorial treatment of the surfaces. But while Degas’s landscapes are peaceful, Courbet’s paintings, both in his under-wood and sea subjects, “directly address the elemental power of the landscape.”47 The same inclination to render nature as still and peaceful is evident in another group of works that Degas, again, executed in Normandy and in emulation of Courbet, the pastel seascapes discussed below.

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Degas, then, adopted Courbet’s self-fashioning tactics. In the 1860s, Courbet was the model for many avant-garde painters. Following the example of his writer friends, who practised different literary genres out of the necessity to survive and succeed as artists, Courbet had been the first painter to practise all genres of painting and even to mix genres in painting since the late 1840s.48 As Doesschate Chu explains, both the practice of mixed genre painting and of posed self-portraits (also derived from the artistic survival tactics of Courbet’s Bohemian writer friends, who followed “the late-Romantic literary fashion for posing” to obtain public visibility) were consciously adopted by Courbet as a strategy to gain fame and financial success. Such “a direct response to the contemporary obsession with the role of art and the position of the artist in modern society,” Doesschate Chu has written, was a result “of a new awareness among artists, of the increased commodification and commercialisation of culture resulting from the expansion of the press.” In the 1850s and 1860s, when Courbet’s fame was at its peak, he was actively involved in the public debate pertaining “to such questions as the nature of artistic genius, the relation between art and emotion, the continued usefulness of the traditional literary and artistic genres, the paragon between the various arts and the subject of synaesthesia.”49 The extent to which, in the 1860s, Degas looked at Courbet as a model is evident in Degas’s own allembracing practice of nearly all of Courbet’s varied forms and tactics of self-promotion. Just like Courbet, in the 1860s Degas painted rocky landscapes, Norman seascapes, hunting and horse-riding scenes, and posed self-portraits, and adopted the practice of portraying one’s circle of friends. What was being passed on to Degas and to the new generation of artists was Courbet’s view that, in the contemporary art market and confronted with the rise of the middle classes, “the fine arts were becoming an industry and artists were turning into producers of commodities for the home” and his “genuine belief” in the total freedom of artists in their creative endeavours, both from any state or institutional patronage, and in their role as free producers for a public that was equally free in its appreciation of their artworks.50 These historical conditions recalled a similar situation in the past. Like in the Dutch Golden Age, in nineteenth-century France artists were aware that they had to fight in a competitive marketplace to gain the attention of the triumphant bourgeois consumer.

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3. On the Channel coast In the late summer of 1869, Degas again spent time in Normandy, on the Channel coast, and perhaps in the villages of Villers-sur-Mer and Etretat, to which refer two addresses that Degas noted in his 1869 notebooks.51 These resorts were located along “the chain of plages that lie between the mouths of the Orne and the Seine” as Dearmer wrote in his guide to Normandy. Here “the sea is always lovely” and the journey along the coast from Caen to Honfleur “is through the prettiest and most varied roads that ever defied the winds.” At the same time, besides being able to enjoy the natural beauty of the Norman seashore, the traveller was immersed “into the full current of modern life.” With their casinos, villas, and bains de mer establishments, remarked Dearmer, these “villages are like American cities in their mushroom growth” and the visitor should think of this “string of watering-places” as “un Far West de high life.”52

Fig. 4-6 Beside the Sea, 1869, pastel cm 23.81 x 31.43, Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Around these locations, Degas executed forty small pastels such as Beside the Sea (Fig. 4-6), in which the composition is reduced to long passages of colour, interrupted by a few dark strokes denoting the people on the beach.53 These pastels are very close to the works exhibited by Courbet at his 1867 exhibition, executed in Normandy two years earlier. In 1865 Courbet had spent three months painting seascapes at Deauville and Trouville, joined there by Whistler and his mistress Jo Heffernan. In 1866 Courbet had gone to Etretat, becoming a “seasonal visitor to the coast of

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Normandy,” first for “health reasons,” writes Doesschate Chu, but then “he found that the popular resorts of Deauville and Trouville also offered an excellent market for his paintings-especially portraits.” He soon “speculated that there might also be a market among those returning to or already back in the city for seascapes,” as he wrote to Alfred Bruyas. In fact, many of the seascapes executed in Normandy in the summers of 1865 and 1866 were exhibited in Paris both at Luquet’s, the art dealer on the rue de Richelieu, and at his 1867 one-man exhibition, the catalogue of which listed among their owners a few of the wealthiest Parisian collectors and bathing guests of the Norman seashore, like Mme de Morny, who owned a villa at Trouville. 54 Degas would have seen these paintings in 1867, but made no reference to them in his notebooks or elsewhere. He would have also heard of the sale of works by Eugène Boudin that took place at the Hôtel Drouot in March 1868, where numerous pastels and watercolours of the sea and sky of the Norman coast were auctioned. In the summer of 1869, however, while Courbet was again painting in Normandy, Degas also went there. The pastel seascapes he executed there are very similar in manner to some of Courbet’s most minimalist paysages de mer, reducing to nothing any other presence but that of the sky and water, merging into a sheet of colour, broken only by the dark line of the horizon. Degas also followed Courbet’s choice of a small format, which made a serial and quick execution easier.55 Courbet’s uncommissioned seascapes, as Doesschate Chu has written, “were often the result of market opportunities or ‘situations’ as he called them.”56 It is likely that Degas’s own seascapes were an attempt in the same direction: the high number of works executed (around forty) may indicate that Degas wanted to paint works that were easily marketable in Paris. Degas, however, had his own aesthetic motivations, as he reworked Courbet’s themes in his personal way: he chose pastel as his medium, and avoided Courbet’s frequent insertion in the composition of such motifs as the cliff or the breaking wave, also preferring a smooth finish to Courbet’s complex textures, evocative of the changing conditions of sea and atmosphere. Degas avoided the drama and the fury of the sea, which Courbet instead sought in his mode of painting, “improvisatory” and “performative” like his own life, as a few writers have noted.57 Degas’s pastel seascapes were a further instance of his Normandism, a mix of Anglomania and Parisian fashion. In the nineteenth century the coast of Normandy had become a favourite destination for Parisians cultivating the British aristocratic bathing culture of holidaymaking by the sea. There were newly-built holiday resorts with bains de mer establishments for all social degrees of clientele. Many visitors went both for the seasonal social life and for hydrotherapy, as

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taking waters with medical properties became popular both at thermal spas and at the seaside. On the model of the thermal baths at Spa in Belgium, or at Baden in the Rhineland, the fashion spread for therapy taken in the proximity of a thermal source, and under Napoleon III the “villes d’eaux” developed near such thermal sources as Vittel, Evian, Chatelguyon, etc. Boulogne, Dieppe, Luc-sur-Mer, Biarritz and Trouville, in Normandy, became fashionable seaside resorts during the nineteenth century.

Fig. 4-7 Combing the Hair, 1869, essence on paper mounted on canvas, cm 47 x 82,6, The National Gallery, London.

In Degas’s Combing the Hair (Fig. 4-7), in the foreground, a nurse is combing the hair of a young girl lying on the sand, the beach behind them scattered with little bathers, many wrapped in white robes. They could be guests of local sanatoria, found at the seaside for the cure of sickly children. Dogs and fashionable types can be seen walking on the beach, where a lady dressed in white and carrying a parasol faces a gentleman in holiday outfit, with hat, and walking stick. The concern for health went hand in hand with the desire for entertainment, and with the attraction of elegant conversation, promenading, luxury hotel accommodation, and casinos. In the 1860s, because of the closeness of the Normandy coast to the capital and because of the new railway connections, “access to these places, already frequented by social, artistic, literary and business elites, extended to include the presence of the middle classes.”58 In pursuit of such clientele or of motifs that could please them, painters such as Courbet, Boudin, Manet, Monet and Jongkind travelled to the Channel

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coast. Degas’s 1869 excursion to the Normandy coast was motivated by his will to position himself within the Realist avant-garde. Degas did not pursue seascape painting later than 1869, unlike Manet, for instance, but his seascapes remain to sanction a kind of Parisian conquest of Normandy, the triumph of the bourgeois in their appropriation and transformation of space according to their aesthetics of life, their manners and fashions (horse racing, fox hunting, holidaying by the sea). Degas was attached to Normandy all his life. He went nearly every year to the Ménil-Hubert and in 1871, during the Prussian siege of Paris, he stayed there with the Valpinçons. After the death of his friend Paul, in 1894, Degas continued to visit his daughter Hortense in Normandy, when she spent time there. In the 1870s he also regularly visited the Rouarts at their holiday house at Queue-en-Brie. In the 1880s, Degas also often went to stay with the Halévys at Dieppe, which had become a meeting point for English artists and writers of the Aesthetic movement, including Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Sickert, William Rothenstein, and the Anglo-Australian Charles Conder.59 Degas knew them through Whistler and through Jacques-Emile Blanche, who had a chalet with studio in Dieppe, next door to the Halévys. It was in Blanche’s studio, as recalled by Sickert, that in 1885 Degas executed his pastel group portrait of Six Friends at Dieppe (Fig. 10-1), given to Mme Blanche. This included Albert Boulanger-Cavé, Ludovic Halévy, Gervex, Sickert, Blanche and Daniel Halévy, appearing in order of age, and in Sickert’s words “one figure growing on to the next in a series of eclipses, and serving, in its turn, as a point de repère for each further accretion.” Degas made a reference to Sickert being the only Englishman in the party by portraying him with his back turned.60 But during the 1860s, Degas’s engagement with Normandy through his paintings had accreted political meanings of Anglomania, and republicanism: it was an oppositional call for freedom, individualism, and liberalism under the regime of Napoleon III, which, in Alastair Horne’s words, first and foremost “pledged France to a return to the old Bonapartist ethos of authoritarian order, in contradistinction to the anarchic chaos of the short-lived Second Republic, yet it would end its days in a failed attempt to regain liberalism.”61 Degas and the other bourgeois painters of the avant-garde travelled to Normandy to sanction their bourgeois, revolutionary, modernising, and urbanising spirit. They were sanctioning a Parisian-ness and a French-ness, which, through their Anglophilia, and on the basis of France’s Norman past, they saw as and wished to be Northern in essence, that is democratic, republican, and liberal, modern in one word.

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Notes 1

Paul was his school friend from Louis-le-Grand, and the son of the banker Edouard. In January 1861 Paul had married Claire Brinquant, and Degas portrayed them both separately and in a drawing in the style of such family portrait drawings by Ingres as Edmond Ramel and his Wife, for instance. Degas adopted similar poses and motifs such the play of the sitters’s hands. By working in the style of Ingres-compare for instance Degas’s rendering of Claire with Ingres’s small portrait drawing of Madame Charles Gounod-Degas was both flattering the Valpinçons as collectors of Ingres and trying to establish himself as a multitalented artist. 2 See for instance Janin, 1844. 3 See Joanne, 1867, pp. 32-3 and France, 1902, p. 8 and pp. 33-4. 4 See on this David Douglas, ed., English Historical Documents, 1955-77. 5 Dearmer, 1900, p. 83 and pp. 95-100. 6 France, 1902, pp. 84-5. 7 Degas, 1947, pp. 105-6 and pp. 108-9. 8 See on the relationship between Napoleon III and England: La Guéronnière, 1858. 9 See on this topic Charle, 2007. 10 Elie (1870-1937) became a philosopher and historian of England, who lectured at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques since 1892 and published a Histoire du peuple anglais au XIX siècle (1923) in various volumes. According to his biographer Myrna Chase, Elie,”no more a simple Anglophile that a laissez-faire liberal, did not consider “English culture and intellect to be equal to French,” but he thought “the English had created the miracle of a responsible politics representing both the masses and the special interests without succumbing to demagoguery or failing to develop an adequate national policy.”: Chase, 1980, p. 5. Daniel (1872-1962) became a scholar of French socialism, biographer of Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Peguy, and editor of Proudhon’s correspondence. See on Daniel: Silvera, 1966 and Laurent, 2001. 11 As Petra ten-Doesschate Chu has discussed in The Most Arrogant Man in France, her book on Courbet. In the 1860s, the necessity for artists to go beyond genre specialisation presented two aspects to their consideration: one related to the market and the other related to the survival of the hierarchy of genres in academic art theory and practice. The first aspect defined a practical need related to the decision as to “the way an artist was going to make a living.” The second aspect was a theoretical concern in the contemporary debate about the hierarchy of genres traditionally imposed by the Academy. Against the position of the latter, the lower genres of painting, such as portrait, landscape, genre, and still life, were no longer seen as inferior by either the critics or the public: Doesschate Chu, 2007, p. 25. 12 See Notebook 13, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 78-83 and Notebook 18, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 92-102. 13 See Kendall, 1993 and Boggs, 1993.

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14 Lecoq de Boisbaudran had taught at the Ecole Gratuite de Dessin. His mnemonic method was a popular technique, adopted for instance by Les Trois (Fantin-Latour, Legros, Whistler: see Legros’s letters, Biblio Doucet) and according to Ernest Rouart, 1937, Degas advocated Boisbaudran’s technique all his life. 15 See for instance The Leicester Steeplechase by Henry Alken and The St. Leger of 1828 by J. F. Herring in Sparrow, 1922, pp. 195-214 on Alken, and pp. 215- on Herring. Also see Sparrow’s discussion on the Dutch and Flemish origin of British sporting painting at pp. 5-6. 16 Reff has identified the paintings alluded to by Degas as William Collins’s Rustic Civility (1833, V& A, London) and William Mulready’s The Wolf and the Lamb (1820, The Queen’s Collection): see Notebook 18 and related footnotes in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 92-102. 17 As stated by Percy Dearmer, the English travel writer, Normandy in his days was very popular with English visitors. In Normandy they realised “perhaps for the first time, that we are indeed in Normandy, so different are these people to the genuine Frenchman, who seem to have swamped the Norman race in the eastern part of the province. Here we feel at home among our kinsfolk, men of no Latin race, but the peaceable descendants of fair-haired Scandinavian pirates.”: Dearmer, 1900, p. 72. 18 H. Bordeaux, Le Walter Scott normand. Barbey d’Aurevilly, Plon, 1925. 19 The Bayeux Tapestry recounts the history of the Norman Conquest of England carried out in 1066 by William the Conqueror, a historical precedent that both Napoleon I and Adolf Hitler invoked to justify or more foolishly to propitiate their own planned invasion of England. One scene of the Tapestry presents the submission of the King of England to the Conqueror, victorious at the battle of Hastings. While Napoleon included the Tapestry in his anti-English political and cultural programme, Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels ordered a team of art historians to study and research the tapestry to demonstrate that it was a purely Nordic and Aryan masterpiece celebrating the Germanic virtues of warfare: Hicks, 2006, p. 226. Napoleon, Himmler, and Charles de Gaulle all had the tapestry moved from the Norman village of Bayeux to Paris for exhibition. In the spring of 1944, Himmler had it taken to the Louvre, and only the landing of the Allies on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944 prevented the Nazis from taking the tapestry to Germany. General de Gaulle chose Bayeux for his triumphant entry in France on June 13 1944, Bayeux being a place significant for “its association with a monument that showed the defeat of the English by the French, the first step in the rehabilitation of the country’s self-confidence.” Because for General de Gaulle “Bayeux continued to symbolize the liberation of France,” in the winter of 1944-45 the tapestry was displayed again in the Louvre to lift the nation’s morale: Hicks, 2006, pp. 232-3 and p. 245. Jules Michelet, historian of France, saw the Bayeux tapestry in 1845. Notable among nineteenthcentury English visitors to Bayeux: John and Effie Ruskin, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Fulford, touring together France on foot in 1855; Alfred Tennyson and his family, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens. English and French scholars took the tapestry as the subject of “endless arguments over

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date, provenance and purpose,” as in England the tapestry was always “perceived to be more English than French.” In 1873, it was displayed at the London Universal Exhibition, where it had enormous success: Hicks, 2006, pp. 134-8, p. 162, and p. 237. 20 See Charle, 2007 for a detailed survey of Anglo-mania in France. 21 See Paris, 1855 and Paris, 1866. 22 Paris, 1866, pp. 1-6 and p. 39. 23 Doesschate Chu, 2006, p. 164 24 See Boulenger, 1925. Anglophilia and the vogue for horse racing in France reached a peak during the Second Empire. Under the Orléans monarchy, horsebreeding was encouraged by such newly founded societies as the Société des Amateurs des Courses (1826), the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Amélioration des Races des Chevaux en France (1833) and, linked to the latter, the Cercle de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Amélioration des Races des Chevaux en France (1834), known as Jockey Club. During the nineteenth century, racecourses were built in most French provinces, and particularly in Brittany and Normandy, whose proximity to England was expected to attract visitors: see Jones in Boggs, 1998, pp. 208-23. 25 In the Degas family the brothers shared the taste for things British that Parisians had shown at least since the reign of Louis-Philippe. In March 1859 Achille Degas, who served in the Navy, was about to sail for Africa on board a ship anchored in Brest. Writing to his brother Edgar in Florence, he announced that he had bought himself a novel by Charles Dickens in English that he intended to translate in his free time during the ocean crossing. Achille, who loved weapons, also wrote that he had bought himself a hunting gun. He also informed his brother that he had been supplied with a revolver by the Navy, and that he would use it “when he would feel like it.” In 1875, Achille, who understood Anglophile behaviour as reading Dickens, hunting, and shooting, would be sent to prison for shooting the husband of his ex-mistress outside the Paris Stock-Exchange: see Loyrette, 1991, pp. 320-4. 26 Boggs, 1998, pp. 75-6. 27 See Kendall, 1993, pp. 80-82. 28 See About, 1867, p. 229 and Salon, 1866, s. d. 29 Degas, 1988, pp. 157-8. 30 Also see the sketches in Notebook 22, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 110-6. 31 Sandblad, 1954, pp. 37-40. Also see Moreau-Nélaton, 1926, I, p. 139. 32 Jacques-Louis David first followed this example as early as 1799, but the Parisian press, who satirised the idea of art as a paying spectacle, derided the practice. The prejudice against admission fee for art shows was deeply rooted in French opinion: the decision by the state to charge admission for the 1855 World Fair resulted in the Salon crowd not going, and Courbet’s Pavillon du Réalisme was unattended for similar reasons, according to Whiteley. A few French artists persisted in wishing to exhibit for an admission fee and sent their works to England and America (Boze, Dauloux, Géricault, Dubufe, among others). Delacroix and his closest associates (Dévéria, Roqueplan, Huet, Champmartin, Bonington,

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Boulanger) were prominent in the attempts to provide alternatives to the Salon in the scheme to form a club on the English model. The exhibitions they held at the Musée Colbert, though, were discontinued. During the July Monarchy, the Salon was held annually, which gave little scope to other exhibitions, but a few artists continued to follow the practice of the private exhibition. Between 1853 and 1863 there was no Salon. Artists focused on the Universal Exhibition or on the few art dealers who organised permanent exhibitions (as did, for instance, Adolphe Goupil, Adolphe Jame in the rue de Provence and Louis Martinet with the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, operating until 1865, Francis Petit’s Cercle de l’Union Artistique in the rue Choiseul). With the reopening of the Salon in 1863 all these activities were put in difficulties and artists began to feel again the tension between the appeal of working for the institutions and the desire to modernise their lives and the art market: see Jon Whiteley in Haskell, ed., 1989, p. 69. 33 See Stevens, 1975 and Driskel, 1993, p. 166 34 In Wilson-Bareau, 1991, p. 47. On the presence of French artists in London also see Pissarro, 1943 and Weisberg, Bonvin and Doesschate Chu, “The Lu(c)re of London: French artists and art dealers in the British capital, 1859-1914,” in Monet, 2005, pp. 39-54. 35 Degas, 1947, p. 11. 36 Degas, 1947, pp. 13-6. He confirmed his impressions of England to his friend Lorenz Fröhlich, to whom he wrote from New Orleans on 27 November 1872, describing with the following words the crossing of the Atlantic: “What a sad crossing. I did not know any English, I hardly know any more, and on English territory, even at sea, there is a coldness and a conventional distrust which you have perhaps already felt.”: Degas, 1947, pp. 20-4. 37 Hancock, 2003, pp. 38 Millard, 1976, pp. 84-5. 39 Degas, 1947, pp. 29-32. The months spent by Degas in New Orleans are well documented in Rewald, 1946; Brown, 1988; Brown, 1990; Brown, 1994 and Benfey, 1997. 40 Notebook 21, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 107-10. 41 Manet’s mother Eugénie had funded the project, and in exchange Edouard and his wife Suzanne left their apartment on the rue des Batignolles and moved in to live with her in the apartment at 49 rue de Saint-Pétersbourg. 42 See Notebook 22, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 110-6. 43 France, 1902, pp. 94-5. 44 Dearmer, 1900, p. 103. 45 Doesschate Chu, 2007, pp. 163-9. 46 Doesschate Chu, 2007, pp 147-9, where she argues against Wagner, 1981. 47 Morton, 2006, p. 81. 48 Doesschate Chu, 2007, p. 26. 49 Doesschate Chu, 2007, p. 19 50 See Doesschate Chu, 2007, p. 13. 51 See Notebook 23, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 116-9. 52 Dearmer, 1900, pp. 239-40.

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53 Richard Kendall has closely studied these works and has linked these landscapes both to Degas’s interest in the English art market and to his friendship at this time with the three Morisot sisters, who spent the holidays painting landscapes in Normandy, at Beuzeval, near Houlgate, staying at the mill owned by the painter Léon Riesener. As Kendall himself indicates, there is no evidence that in the autumn of 1869 Degas went to visit the Morisots on the occasion of his trip to Beuzeval. The pastels executed by Degas, however, are very close to the marines of Riesener and Paul Huet, who both painted at Beuzeval, and for Kendall this closeness may lie behind Degas’s trip to Beuzeval. Kendall illustrates his hypothesis with a map of the Normandy coast near Houlgate. By showing the exact sites where Degas executed his forty pastels Kendall aims to prove that, contrary to old conventional belief, Degas was not “an artist indifferent to landscape” and still less “a painter planning ‘nebulous studies’ on his return to a distant Paris studio.” These pastels “are as much part of Degas’s documentary project as his land-based motifs, and even at their most vaporous must be seen as particularised accounts of local circumstances, rather than as the efflorescence of a city-dweller’s mind.” But then the writer admits that Degas’s seascapes are “uncharacteristic” within his oeuvre and that for their strangeness “they demand explanation” and contextualisation. This he finds in the vogue of the Norman seascape motif among the landscape painters of the day (Chintreuil, Huet, Delacroix, Courbet, Boudin, Jongkind, Whistler, and Zandomeneghi) who constituted for Degas the “historic precedent in his choice of both motif and procedure,” offering “a lineage and a syntax for Degas’s 1869 pastels” with their “narrative-free view of nature.”: Kendall, 1993, p. 99-100. 54 Doesschate Chu, 2006, pp. 160-1. 55 See Morton and Eyerman, 2006, p. 6. 56 As on the occasion of his 1865 visit to Deauville and Trouville, where, having encountered a demand for portraits on the part of fashionable guests, he decided to stay three months, rather than three days as he had planned: Doesschate Chu, 2007, pp. 141-2. 57 Morton and Eyerman, 2006, p. 7 and pp. 11-2. Morton writes that Courbet’s painting of the landscapes of his native Franche-Comté was perceived as “an independent, somewhat savage spirit and a rugged-primal energy – characteristics that critics associated with both Courbet’s personality and his art. Painting his native landscape was a kind of autobiography, an extended self-portraiture. There was a general sense that the dramatic nature of the region’s topography, its steep valleys and stony protrusions, determined the originality of Courbet’s painting.” : ibid., p. 55 and see Herding, 1991. As Mary Morton writes, ”Courbet’s landscapes and the critical response to them correspond to the philosophical movement of positivism, which peaked in the 1860s. Defined against philosophical spiritualism and idealism, positivism asserted that knowledge was based on the data of empirical experience, to the exclusion of a priori or metaphysical speculation. Like Courbet’s painting, positivism was progressive and was considered destabilizing to the status quo in its redistribution of power from institutions to individuals.” Morton also points to the interesting correlations between Courbet’s art and the

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writings of positivist philosopher Hyppolite Taine, who applied his prescription for art as “intensely vital, ardently empirical and intimately connected to nature” to literary and art history in his two series of writings: Histoire de la littérature anglaise and La philosophie de l’art, published respectively in 1863-9 and 186569. As Morton continues: “Taine’s theory was driven both by a professional mission to make art writing more objective and scientific, and, paradoxically, by his personal sense of anxiety regarding the state of modern urban life. Running through Taine’s art history is a sense of nostalgia for life during what he considered to be the high points of human culture- fifth-century Greece, the Italian Renaissance, and seventeenth-century Netherlandish culture-periods in which, in Taine’s account, the balance between body and mind produced brilliant works of art. In Taine’s narrative, these historical moments were marked by a vital corporeal culture characterised by physical health, masculine virility, sensuality, and sexual expression and fulfillment. Modern times, according to Taine, suffer from excessive cerebral activity, resulting in the neglect of the body and physical instincts. Emerging from Taine’s text is an image of the modern urbanite as passive, impotent, ad anxious, passing his time in his robe and slippers pacing his secure, carpeted apartment.” : ibid., pp. 12-3. Also see Morton, 1998, p. 106. 58 See Rauch, 1996, pp. 15-20. 59 See Ellmann, 1987, pp. 503-4. According to Phil Baker, one of the main reasons the decadents and aesthetes gathered in Dieppe was to escape “the oppressive atmosphere in London”: Baker, 2001, p. 38. 60 Sickert, 1917. Also see Gruetzner-Robins, 1988. 61 Horne, 2002, p. 262.

CHAPTER FIVE DEGAS’S ICONOGRAPHY

1. Self-referential portraiture This chapter discusses Degas’s portraiture and self-portraiture of the 1860s and early 1870s as a modern and Northern autobiographical enterprise by which Degas responded to his necessity to find a way to recognition and market. Degas’s practice of portraiture also enables us to further understand Degas’s social class and his bohemianism. In a letter of 11 November 1858 written from Paris to Edgar in Florence, Auguste referred to Edgar’s “boredom with portraiture.” The letters that Edgar must have written to his father in these years have vanished, but we guess that the artist had previously complained about the amount of study required by his large portrait of his relatives, The Bellelli Family. In that letter, written a few months before Edgar’s return to Paris in the spring of 1860, Auguste suggested that Edgar had better overcome his boredom, for one main reason. Portraiture would finally be Edgar’s most precious asset, considering the urgency of the “question du pot-aufeu,” that is, having to make a living. This, insisted Auguste, was a question “so serious, imperious and crushing that only the fools could afford to lose sight of it.” A few lines down, Auguste also suggested Edgar get himself a warm English wool coat for the coming Italian winter. His uncle would give him the money for it, and Auguste begged Edgar to use it carefully, “because God knows if we have more money than the strictly necessary.” The image of Degas as a bohemian artist is not a familiar one, as we are all accustomed to the image, if no longer of the aristocratic Degas, of Degas as the comfortable bourgeois artist. All the evidence, however, suggests that, on the contrary, he was a true bohemian, a city artist living in economic uncertainty.1 He was lucky enough to have a father willing to support him at the beginning of his career, but only within the limits of necessity, unlike the truly well off Manet or Caillebotte. Auguste was not a skilled businessman and lived meagrely from his merchant-banking business. Edgar was made fully aware of this. There were strains in the

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relationship between father and son that had a bearing on Edgar’s artmaking: Edgar often complained, in correspondence with his aunt Laure, about what he thought was his father’s avariciousness, thus betraying greater life-style expectations, perhaps based on the fact that Auguste’s business had seen better days. The reality was presented to him in explicit terms by his aunt in a letter where she explained that his father, a man of taste who had provided his children with a proper education, had no money. From that moment on, Degas knew in no uncertain terms that he had to work his way forward into the Parisian art world. In February 1874, just a few weeks before the opening of the first Impressionist exhibition that Edgar was helping organise, Auguste died in Naples. He left large debts that Degas had to repay, by painting. It was expected of him, as the eldest child, that he should defend the honour of the family. In the years of the Impressionist exhibitions on the Parisian boulevards, Degas, the painter of dance classes, could not actually afford to go to the Opera and very rarely went, as we know from his correspondence. This pinpoints for Degas a Parisian geography that has a fictive and symbolic site as one of its major elements (the Paris Opera), and directs us to having to consider his numerous dance classes as truly Dutch works: exercises in memory, certainly plausible and realistic but not artworks that reflect in any way their author’s assiduous attendance of theatre. This is confirmed by what has been previously assessed as his inaccurate depiction of ballerina costumes.2 The same can be said of his depictions of horses and races. These paintings produced in the strictures of Parisian bohemianism are images conjuring a symbolic reality on two levels. One level worked for Degas as a metaphor for the working condition of the modern artist, following a Balzacian topos that applied to ballerinas and horses. The other level embodied a Parisian-ness that appealed to audiences of the Third Republic, in the chauvinistic climate that ensued following the defeat of France at the hand of the Prussians in 1870. But if we return to examine Degas’s portraiture of the 1860s, it becomes clear that Degas’s art was affected by his bohemianism even at an earlier stage. For want of a clientele and in search of publicity, and while still doing history painting, Degas took up voluntary, as opposed to commissioned, portrait painting of his friends and acquaintances. With rare exceptions,3 the Degas literature invariably explains that Degas did not paint portraits on commission because he did not need to sell. As a matter of fact, painting portraits of friends on one’s own initiative was a well-known self-promotional and self-referential strategy used by avantgarde artists such as Courbet since 1847-48. Courbet also painted personalities of his time, not all his personal acquaintances, but using

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photographs and prints when he needed to, and exhibited them in public. The construction of such a personal Pantheon, as Doesschate Chu has called it, did not depend for Courbet on the assurance that these paintings would be bought by their sitters. In fact, these portraits were not easy to sell, and were more often bought by friends other than the sitters themselves. Their importance lay in their promotional value. Courbet aimed at sharing in the public status of the portrayed likenesses: “Their importance, for the artist, rested in their self-referentiality.”4 In the 1860s, as we have seen, Degas was following Courbet’s Northern traces in selfportraiture, landscape, and seascape painting, trying out Courbettian mechanisms to his own advantage. But while adopting Courbet’s approach, Degas did so in his personal manner, as his specialisation in portraiture became the image of the top-hatted bourgeois artist. Degas also situated his art in the tradition of the Dutch group portrait, above all in his scenes of musicians and dancers, but before discussing this aspect of his art, we will look at the many portraits and self-portraits Degas executed in the 1860s and early 1870s. Bearing a marked and self-centred autobiographical intent, the portraits constitute a no less modern and Northern enterprise than the group portraits in the style of the Dutch. The many portraits Degas executed of friends, artists, and musicians, of engineers, soldiers, and accountants, and of personages of public life whom he never met in person (Pauline de Metternich, for example) have been amply studied individually. But to grasp their meaning these portraits must be seen as a whole. This approach makes sense because the portraits and self-portraits help us to reconstruct Degas’s personal and artistic world as a unified story, and raise issues such as friendship, fraternity, and selffashioning, which were relevant to artists in the Paris of the second half of the nineteenth century. These paintings were part of the artist’s autobiographical enterprise. This presents such commonalities with Anthony van Dyck’s Iconography that when we see this in light of what we know of Degas’s interest in Van Dyck, it is evident that Degas was painting his own Iconography in emulation of the Fleming. While Degas left no sign of interest in Van Dyck’s history painting, the effects of the latter’s portraits on Degas were decisive. As we have seen, it was in Italy, in front of the portraits of aristocrats by Van Dyck seen in the palaces of Genoa, that Degas thought how no other painter had equaled the Fleming in revealing “la grâce et la finesse de la femme, l’élégance et la chevalerie de l’homme” and “la distinction de tous les deux.” In writing those words to Moreau, Degas added that in Van Dyck there must be more than a “disposition naturelle,” as the painter “réfléchissait sur son sujet et s’en pénétrait en poète.” Degas thought that

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Van Dyck proceeded from empathy with the sitter, like a poet proceeds from impersonation. The idea that painting and poetry interplayed in Van Dyck’s art and that this accounted for a neuroticism in the Fleming’s art was one that Degas liked to discuss with Moreau in Italy, where he had understood his own penchant for the Northern Baroque, and one that he reprised in their correspondence.5 Degas knew the collection of etched portraits published by Van Dyck as Iconographia: in a notebook used in Italy and in Paris in 1858-60, he had copied from it the portrait of Orazio Gentileschi by Van Dyck.6 Also, as we have seen in Chapter Two, Degas was certainly acquainted with Van Dyck’s portraits executed in England while he was painter to the court of Charles I and was immersed in the intellectual climate of the society of the Cavalier Poets who surrounded the King, and whom he also portrayed. Degas would bear those portraits in mind well into the 1870s.7 In the 1860s Degas was absorbed in an autobiographical project for which Van Dyck’s portraiture provided the model to imitate. After his years in Italy (1621-27) and after his stay at the court of Charles I of England in 1632, Van Dyck enjoyed such a reputation as a great portrait painter who worked quickly and skillfully, that in Europe, so H. Knackfuss wrote in 1899, “hardly a person of any consequence who lived at Antwerp, or stayed there on a passing visit, omitted to have himself painted by Van Dyck.” Passing through Antwerp in 1631, the French Queen Marie de’ Medici went to Van Dyck’s studio to sit for her portrait. Frans Hals, according to the anecdote, turned up unexpectedly, and without announcing himself at Van Dyck’s studio to have his portrait painted. He then offered to paint his portrait of Van Dyck, who only then could assign a name to the hand of the master from Harlem.8 Van Dyck’s portraits included the nobles of Europe, kings and queens, commanders and generals, statesmen, thinkers, musicians, and scientists, not all of whom Van Dyck had met, as much as the friends of the artist: the painters, sculptors, and engravers who worked in the Flanders and in Holland in his days. While reserving the full-length format for the former category of sitters, Van Dyck chose the half-length or bust format for his portraits of friends, some of which were executed voluntarily and given to the sitters as a present. From some of these paintings Van Dyck had prints made, and collected under the title Iconographia. Martin van der Balen published the first edition of the collection during Van Dyck’s lifetime. It included eighty portraits: sixteen of princes and generals, twelve of statesmen and men of thought, and fifty-two of Dutch and Flemish artists and art collectors. Among the former appeared commanders of the Thirty Years War such as Albert of Arenberg, Guzman, Francis-Thomas of Savoy, King

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Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Albert de Wallenstein, whom Van Dyck never met. He executed their portraits from prints that circulated widely in Europe. This makes one think immediately of Degas’s Portrait of Pauline de Metternich, analysed below. She was a personage of the Imperial court in Paris whom Degas never met and whose portrait he executed from a Disdéri carte de visite that circulated in Paris in the 1860s.9 One also thinks of Degas’s double Portrait of General Mellinet and Rabbi Astruc (Collection City of Gérardmer), also analysed below, showing the likenesses of two personalities engaged in the fight against the Prussians in the war of 1870-71, and whom Degas most probably did not know personally. These works can be understood as a form of selffashioning and autobiographical construction aiming at immortalising the artist’s personal world, a project in which Degas followed Van Dyck, in his years of struggle for professional affirmation. Among the group of portraits in Van Dyck’s Iconography were also the portraits of Marie de’ Medici, Queen of France, of her son Gaston d’Orléans and his wife, Marguerite de Lorraine, the parents of Mademoiselle d’Orléans, who may be represented in Degas’s Scene of War in the Middle Ages, as argued in Chapter Two. The statesmen and men of thought depicted by Van Dyck included Constantijn Huygens, Justus Lipsius, Kenelm Digby, and Nicolas Peiresc. The first of the fifty-two portraits of artists and collectors in Van Dyck’s Iconography, was the portrait of Rubens, followed by Van Dyck’s self-portrait and by the portrait of Lucas Vorsterman, and then all the others.10 A copy of the 1759 edition of the work entered early the collections of the Bibliothèque Impériale in Paris and Degas may have seen it. In this edition Degas would have seen as a whole the portraits of scholars, musicians, artists, soldiers that inspired his works. It was the unofficial side of the art of the Fleming that interested Degas, the art of the court painter in whose eyes his bourgeois fellow workers of the brush, the chisel or the burin, were so many true aristocrats of their time, in the line of a Northern tradition of individualism and self-consciousness which had been inaugurated by Albrecht Dürer in the German Renaissance. In line with this tradition, pursued by Rubens and Van Dyck in the seventeenth century, Degas was self-fashioning his personality and artistic career. Between the Golden Age and France in the second-half of the nineteenth century the parallel runs at an historical level: just like the Netherlands in the Golden Age, France was facing modernisation, that is, to use Michael North’s words, the change from aristocratic to bourgeois society.11 In fact, how modern France actually was would become evident almost overnight in September 1870, when the Republic was proclaimed as soon as news of

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the defeat by the Prussians and the capture of Napoleon III on the battlefield of Sedan reached Paris.

Fig. 5-1 Portrait of Pauline de Metternich, 1865-66, oil on canvas, cm 41 x 29, The National Gallery, London.

Fig. 5-2 Portrait of a Man, 1867, oil on canvas, cm 85 x 65, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York.

2. Pauline de Metternich and other monsters Before considering the self-portraits, portraits, and double portraits by Degas for which he is known and which speak of self-presentation, friendship, and social cohesion among struggling Parisian artists, I will

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look at the Portrait of Pauline de Metternich (Fig. 5-1) painted by Degas in 1865. This work is rarely commented upon, probably because it is taken for an irrelevant exercise. In reality, this work further illustrates the way in which Degas’s portraits of the 1860s and early 1870s are linked in a mythmaking strategy of avant-garde self-fashioning and professional affirmation in the city of Paris. Degas never frequented fashionable salons close to the imperial court, as did his friends Moreau, Lepic, and Ludovic Halévy.12 But being an unknown painter, Degas did not feel debarred from choosing sitters even among the fashionable. In order to execute the portrait of the wife of Prince Richard Metternich, son of the Chancellor, and himself the Austro-Hungarian ambassador in Paris since 1860, Degas used a photograph of the couple in a visiting card. He took out Pauline’s figure, cut it to a more familiar three-quarter format and added the brown wallpaper background. Pauline de Metternich was no acquaintance of his, but in a self-fashioning enterprise such as his, the portrait might demonstrate the contrary. Just as with Degas’s English landscapes painted in Normandy and with his repetitive and apparently gratuitous paintings of horses and dance classes, executed despite having hardly seen any horse races or dance classes, these works draw a world in which what comes to life is the myth of the modern urban artist conquering and appropriating his space in the city. In the Portrait of Pauline de Metternich, we see one of the liveliest characters of Parisian court life, and one who contributed to the climate of extravagance and low morality that characterised the years of the Second Empire. She was a modern woman of avant-garde taste, especially in music. A close acquaintance of Empress Eugénie and of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, Pauline, in the chronicles of Second Empire life by Ernest Vizetelly, was “possessed of no little eccentricity as well as wit.” She held a fashionable salon in the Austrian Embassy in the rue de Varennes, dressed at the House of Worth, and threw lavish balls. Pauline was fond of theatre, dance, singing and playing music. She loved playing tricks on others, and made no affectation of having “good taste,” quite the contrary.13 A cigar smoker, she introduced Franz Liszt to the Court and interceded to bring Richard Wagner’s Tannhaüser to the Paris Opera in 1861, when no one appreciated such modern music. She also loved light spectacles and attended the shows at the Théâtre des Variétés and at the Palais Royal. Just as Degas did, Pauline loved Thérésa, the hysteric-style performer of the café-concert Alcazar, from whom she took singing lessons. It was often observed at the time that Pauline “was not a beauty.” For her facial features, she styled herself “monkey à la mode.” A jolie laide, she sported her ugliness, which “was forgotten when the Princess

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spoke, for she was the wittiest woman of the age,” exercising, Vizetelly informs us, “no little political as well as social influence at the Court of the Empire.”14 She was a powerful and unconventional woman of her age and Degas included her in his own iconography, just as Van Dyck had included in his Iconographia Marie de’ Medici, Marguerite de Lorraine, and Geneviève d’Urfé, women of power whom he deemed worthy of his acknowledgement. Degas was also interested in Pauline’s unusual face, as a physiognomic sign of personality and originality. Even without considering his dancers of the 1870s or his bathers so often mentioned for their ugliness by Symbolist critics, there is evidence in other paintings by Degas of an interest for the monstrous. This was noted by Loyrette, who defined it as Degas’s delight in “emphasizing the exaggerated features of his models” in the male portraits of unidentified sitters known as The Collector of Prints (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Portrait of a Man (The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York).15 Even in this respect, by shunning idealisation, Degas is no classicist: he places himself along Rembrandt, and along the taste for “rough types” in Flemish artists, such as seen in Quentin Matsys, Pieter Aertsen, or Joachim Beuckelaer. Another work in Degas’s iconography is The Collector of Prints (1866, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), in which a seated man dressed in grey trousers, soft black hat, and black cape, has just stopped leafing through a portfolio of prints to look at the viewer. He is holding between his fingers a print of Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759-1840), the Belgian painter of flowers who had worked for Marie Antoinette, for Empress Joséphine at the Malmaison, and for Queen Marie-Amélie. More Redouté prints appear in the background. In a cabinet to the man’s left stands an Oriental statuette of a horse and on the wall hangs what is either a trompe-l’oeil or board pinned with fabric samples, calling cards and other pictures.16 The soft black hat projects a deep shadow on the eyes of the collector of prints, while his big nose and left ear are in full light, set off by the brownish beard. Also belonging to Degas’s iconography is the Portrait of a Man at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (1866-67, Fig. 5-2), a painting that is both portrait and a still life, and whose sitter remains unidentified. In his memories of Degas, Sickert recalled that Degas loved to “bombard” him with stories of his English friends, whom he teased for their heavily accented French, and one of them “had succeeded in getting a still-life of a beef steak skied in the Salon.”17 Loyrette has proposed to identify the man as Robert Grahame or Graham, a Scottish painter of still life who lived in Montmartre and exhibited at the Salon. Like Manet, Graham had studied

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with Couture.18 He is sitting in a chair, in a still-life painter’s studio where a framed painting appears in the background, featuring oil sketches on a white canvas, partly covered by a white cloth. Just under this canvas hanging on the wall, on the right-hand side, we see a table draped in a white cloth, displaying a dish of meats and a pear. Degas has placed his large hairy head, featuring a protuberant nose, against the white background and half in shadow. Degas is of course trying to impress viewers with his own command of pictorial technique in capturing the physical attributes of the items on the table, in the tradition of still-life painting.19 In his handling, though, these paintings also show Degas’s fascination with disproportioned facial features (protuberant noses and ears, large mouths) and, through his compositional devices, and his determination to bring these to the attention of the viewers. Behind this disregard of abstraction and anonymity, there is also the artist’s aim to signal the discerning observational skills, and virtuosity expected of a portrait painter, while at the same time addressing and demonstrating the uniqueness of the individual. In this, consistently with a Northern-looking, avant-garde, and non-classicist Degas, I see Degas’s self-fashioning as a seventeenth-century sensibility including a specific Rembrandtesque taste for the ugly that was undergoing a revival in Parisian artistic circles in Degas’s times.20

3. Painting and social life In Degas’s iconography, a few of his sitters are known today, others do not have a name, and others are known but forgotten names in the history of art. In mapping Degas, we are reminded that he was for many years part of a mass of Parisian artists, a sub-world of the history of art from which a few names occasionally resurface. One of them is, for instance, the landscape painter Alfred-Pierre Bellet du Poisat (1823-83), a pupil of Flandrin and Delacroix whom Degas portrayed around 1866-67 on a small wooden panel. Degas chose the bust format, appropriate to the portraiture of friends and intimates. Bellet du Poisat does not look directly at the viewer, and his diverted gaze makes him look aloof, proud and distinguished in the top hat and fur collar which frame his bearded face.21 There are other portraits by Degas of Parisian artists such as Lepic, Emile Lévy, Zacharie Zacharian, Léopold Levert (a designer of military uniforms) or, among the better-known names, Moreau, James Tissot, Evariste de Valernes, and Léon Bonnat. They practised either a very detailed realism or history painting, as in the case of Moreau, and their works were readily accepted at the Salon. At the same time, Degas was

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also part of a circle of musicians and artists who practised a more controversial and unfinished realism. They gathered around Manet and his wife Suzanne, a musician and a Wagnerian whose talent Baudelaire greatly appreciated. Degas’s portraits of them, or those of the Morisot sisters, are well known, because these artists, as well as Degas, today belong in what James Cutting has aptly described as the canon of Impressionism.22 The notebooks Degas was using around 1865 permit us to reconstruct the painter’s social contacts. The names of Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir and Frédéric Bazille appear in the notebooks of the mid-1860s, while his presence was also noticed at the meeting places of avant-garde culture, such as the Café Guerbois, at the foot of Montmartre.23 Suzanne Leenhoff was a Dutch pianist who had been engaged in the 1850s by the Manets as a piano teacher to the three brothers, Edouard, Gustave, and Eugène. Suzanne, who had given birth in 1852 to a child of uncertain paternity called Léon, married Manet in October 1863.24 In 1867 the couple and the young Léon moved in with Edouard’s mother, Eugénie, at 49 rue de Saint-Pétersbourg. Mme Auguste Manet had a salon where she received her own and Suzanne’s guests on Tuesdays and the friends of her three sons on Thursdays. The Thursday evenings included an extraordinary mix of Republican politicians and Anglophile avant-garde artists, writers, musicians, poets, critics. Among these, Baudelaire was a regular presence (until his death in 1867), so were Mallarmé and Théodore de Banville in later years. Among the artists were Degas, Alfred Stevens, Puvis de Chavannes, Fantin-Latour and his future wife Victoria Dubourg, and Félix Bracquemond. Writers and critics of progressive ideas were seen, such as Emile Zola, Théodore Duret, Zacharie Astruc, Champfleury and Edmond Duranty, politicians such as Antonin Proust, Emile Ollivier, and, later, Georges Clemenceau and Léon Gambetta, a reminder of the firm Republicanism of the Manets. Other guests were the Paul Meurices and Commandant Hyppolite Lejosne and his wife Thérèse, who were Bazille’s uncle and aunt. Also guests were Eva Gonzalès and Mme Morisot with her three daughters, Berthe, Edma, and Yves, when in Paris. There was singing, and music was played by the Catalan guitarist Jaime Bosch, by Emmanuel Chabrier, as well as by Mme Paul Meurice and Suzanne Manet.25 One such musical evening provided Degas with the subject matter for a double portrait of Suzanne and Edouard Manet (1867-68, Fig. 5-3). In the picture, which is damaged, Manet appears sitting comfortably on a couch, while Suzanne, seen in profile, plays the piano. The painting is an example of the Northern mix of genres: it is as much a peinture de genre as it is a double portrait. It was given to Manet, who cut it with a knife to eliminate

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most of Suzanne’s figure, which was not to his taste. Degas, as we have seen, did not idealise the features of his sitters when he found them characteristic of the individual. Degas could not understand Manet’s mutilation of his canvas and when he saw the picture in that state he was so humiliated that he took it back to his studio, where it was found at his death. According to anecdote, he sent back to Manet the Plums he had been given, and for some time the two did not speak. They eventually made peace, and shortly after, Manet’s stepson, Léon Koëlla, was even given a job as an errand boy for Auguste Degas’s merchant-banking business.26

Fig. 5-3 Suzanne and Edouard Manet, 1867-68, oil on canvas, cm 65 x 71, Kytakiushu Museum of Art, Tokyo.

Wednesday evenings were spent at the house of Alfred Stevens, also of the Guerbois circle. Stevens was a Belgian who had studied painting in Paris between 1844 and 1849, before moving permanently to the French capital in 1852. He regularly exhibited at the Salon. He was the son of an art collector and occasional art dealer, and his older brother Joseph was also a painter. Their younger brother Arthur was an art dealer, critic, and art adviser to King Leopold of Belgium, in whose collection at Brussels one would find paintings by the Stevens brothers.27 Arthur dealt in works by Parisian artists. One of Degas’s paintings would be sold by the dealer to Jules van Praet, a Belgian collector, historian, and diplomat at the

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Belgian court, in whose house Degas and his brother Achille saw it hung, during a visit to Brussels in 1869. Van Praet had owned Millet’s Angelus.28 A friend of Courbet, Corot, Delacroix, Couture, and others, Stevens’s friendship and advice were much sought by the younger artists he knew, such as Berthe Morisot, Manet, Degas, and Whistler. At the 1867 Universal Exhibition, Stevens, who was already a favourite artist of the Imperial court, exhibited eighteen paintings and received a first-class medal. A collector of Japanese art, of eighteenth-century French furniture, and objets d’art, he was an aesthete and entertained in luxury. In an updated version of Netherlandish peinture de genre, he painted women in interiors. On Wednesday evenings Stevens and his wife Marie received guests at their house at 18 rue Taitbout, and then, from 1874 to 1880, at 65 rue des Martyrs. Living close by, Degas, who would be godfather to their daughter Catherine, was of the company. He never portrayed Stevens or his wife, though he portrayed the Morisot sisters, Edma, Berthe, and Yves, also assiduous evening guests at the Manets. In 1869 Edma married a naval officer, Adolphe Pontillon, and moved to Lorient. Her correspondence with Berthe is an essential source of information about Degas, his friends, and their conversational subjects: private affairs as well as literature, music, art, and the Parisian art world. In a letter to Berthe of 15 March 1869, Edma mentioned her reading of Adolphe, by Benjamin Constant, which Degas had suggested her.29 In her reply, Berthe described one of their Wednesday evenings at the house of the Stevens and a conversation with Degas: Monsieur Degas seems greatly pleased with his portrait. It is the one thing he has done for the exhibition. He talked about you to me last night: he finds you very strange. From several things he said about you, I judge him to be very observing. He laughed on hearing that you are reading Adolphe. He came and sat beside me, pretending that he was going to court me, but this courting was confined to a long commentary on Solomon’s proverb, ‘Woman is the desolation of the righteous.’30

This is a unique chance to see Degas interacting with a respectable young woman and fellow artist. There are indications that Berthe was inclined to flirting or at least not totally to discourage flirting by men, especially artists, but, of course, both Degas and Berthe would have been aware of courtship rules, and it is quite clear from the passage that Berthe was not really expecting flirtation on the part of Degas. He was known already, among these acquaintances, for what Manet had defined as Degas’s total inability at being gallant.31 More interesting are the nuances in the exchange between a Byronic/Aurevillean Degas, dismissing, with a grin

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laced with references to Adolphe, the superior genteel woman in front of him, and Berthe, a modern urbane Parisian and a woman of sense, who could only be amused by the unmanly proposition of the artist in front of her. Berthe and Degas went ahead with their mock-courtship: Degas gave her a fan depicting Spanish dancers and singers with Alfred de Musset playing the guitar to a Spanish dancer.32 Fans can be precious records of the theme, activities, and private language used by informal artistic cenacles, as Michael Marrinan has written regarding the fan painted by Auguste Charpentier and George Sand in 1838. The fan shows caricatures of their artistic cenacle in an “otherwise arcane imagery” that “offers a glimpse of how insider language and references developed in a circle of friends where familiarity and frankness suspended the usual formalities of social interaction.”33 Fans, then, could have internal meanings in a fine art setting.34 Within the trend for fans with hispagnoliste themes (such as Manet’s 1866-67 fans with bullfight themes) Degas presented Berthe with a design alluding to the flirting games she played with these bizarre penniless artists, with Berthe’s own Spanish dark eyes and hair being a key to the point of the fan. On March 21, Edma wrote to Berthe: For one thing, I am curious to know what he could have to say about me, and what he finds strange in my person. The commentary on the proverb must have been pretty and piquant. You may call me crazy if you like, but when I think of any of these artists, I tell myself that a quarter of an hour of their conversation is worth as much as many sterling qualities.35

All this tells us something about Degas’s sociability and dealings with women: at least in this truly bourgeois circle, Degas played the Aurevillean dandy, and the Morisots appreciated the entertainment he provided for them in playfully unsettling etiquette, while relishing the safety of their position of social power over “any of these artists,” as unfolds from the letter above. But Berthe could be conventionally well bred in her opinions when Degas seemed to enjoy the company of women she considered inferior to herself. Berthe described the opening of the Paris Salon to her sister Edma in a letter of May 2, 1869. At the Salon she had met Carolus-Duran, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Puvis de Chavannes, and Degas. That year, Berthe had posed both for Puvis de Chavannes and for Manet’s Le Balcon. As for Degas, she commented: “Monsieur Degas seemed happy, but guess for whom he forsook me, for Mademoiselle Lille and Madame Loubens. I must admit that I was a little annoyed when a man whom I consider to be very intelligent deserted me to pay compliments to two silly women.”36 The two silly women would soon appear in a double portrait by Degas of around 1870: seated next to each

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other, Mlle Lisle resting her arms on her lap, and Mme Loubens bending over and leaning on her elbows, in a pose denoting closeness.37 The portrait follows a formula that Van Dyck had used in his double portraits of sisters, and which Degas repeated often, as in two small wooden panels, one with Gabrielle and Angèle Beauregard of around 1859 and the other with his Italian cousins, Giovanna and Giulia Bellelli. The latter are also depicted in the Two sisters of around 1865, and two other cousins of Degas, the sisters Elena and Camilla Montejasi-Cicerale, appear in another double portrait of 1867.38 To return to the Salon of 1869 and to Berthe’s comments on Degas’s female acquaintances, that year the painter was exhibiting the Portrait of Joséphine Gaugelin (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), to which Berthe referred with the following words in a letter to Edma of 5 May: Monsieur Degas has a very pretty little portrait of a very ugly woman in black, with a hat and a cachemire falling from her shoulders. The background is that of a very light interior, showing a corner of a mantelpiece in half tones; it is very subtle and distinguished.39

Fig. 5-4 Portrait of Mme Gobillard, 1869, oil on canvas, cm 55.2 x 65.1, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Degas also met the third Morisot sister, Yves Gobillard, whom he portrayed (Fig. 5-4). This is an important work, because we have extensive first-hand documentation about its genesis and motivation from the correspondence between the members of the Morisot family. Furthermore, we possess various sketches and a related pastel portraying the same sitter,

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which make the portrait of Yves the best illustration of Degas’s working practice. Yves, Tiburce, Edma, and Berthe were all painters and close acquaintances of Degas in the late 1860s, through Manet. Yves had married Théodore Gobillard in 1866, and had moved to Brittany. In the late spring of 1869, Yves visited her parents in Paris and stayed at their house in the rue Franklin, where Degas began to work at her portrait.40 Yves and Degas probably met at the Stevens’s on a Wednesday evening. In a letter of May 11 to Edma in Lorient, Berthe wrote about the past Wednesday at the house of the Stevens, saying that their sister Yves had “certainly made a conquest of Degas. He asked her to permit him to paint a portrait of her.”41 This piece of correspondence details Degas’s practice of making one realm of the social and the professional spaces, an overlapping which, centred as it was on Degas himself, turned his oeuvre into a self-fashioning and auto-biographical project, like a self-spinning web. The Morisot portraits are also exemplary spatial stories in mapping Degas’s life and work. His tactics of offering to portray Yves and coming to the Morisot’s house to sketch her while holding a conversation shows Degas’s spatial practice of appropriating the spaces that would construct his identity as an original Parisian painter. This was a “practice of everyday life,” to use Michel de Certeau’s phrase, by means of which Degas sought recognition as a painter in Paris. In one of her letters, Madame Morisot wrote to Edma about Degas’s portrait of Yves, and how he was fascinated by her face: “Do you know that Monsieur Degas is mad about Yves’s face, and that he is doing a sketch of her? He is going to transfer on to the canvas the drawing that he is doing on his sketchbook. A peculiar way of doing a portrait! ”42 In her own comments on Degas as a man of mind not given to feelings, Berthe also referred to the sittings and gossiping among painters: As for your friend Degas, I certainly do not find his personality attractive; he has wit, but nothing more. Manet said to me very comically yesterday, ‘He lacks spontaneity, he isn’t capable of loving a woman, much less of telling her that he does or of doing anything about it.’ (…) Monsieur Degas has made a sketch of Yves, that I find indifferent; he chattered all the time he was doing it, he made fun of his friend Fantin, saying that the latter would do well to seek new strength in the arms of love, because at present painting no longer suffices him. He was in a highly satirical mood; he talked to me about Puvis, and compared him to the condor in the Jardin des Plantes.43

While gossiping and comparing Puvis de Chavannes to an enormous bird, Degas sketched for Yves’s portrait.44 The final portraits consist of an oil

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painting and a pastel portrait. The latter, (Fig. 5-4) would be exhibited at the 1870 Salon.45 In both works, Yves Gobillard appears in profile, a pose that emphasises her protruding jaw, a feature that must have struck Degas as distinctive. In 1869 Degas also executed the Portrait of Victoria Dubourg (Fig. 55), a still-life painter who also belonged to the Manet circle. Dubourg would eventually marry Fantin-Latour and become his first biographer.46 In Degas’s portrait, Dubourg sits in a tall wooden chair; her hands are clasped as she leans toward the viewer looking on with a frank and confident gaze. The double portrait/genre scene of unidentified sitters, Violinist and Woman (1872, Detroit Institute of Arts), which reminds of many analogous scenes in Netherlandish painting, also relates to the artistic and musical evenings at the Manet’s or at the Stevens’. To this category also belongs the double portrait of Auguste Degas listening to the guitarist Lorenzo Pagans. Other artists and musicians that Degas portrayed in the late 1860s were the Camus: Blanche Dumoustier de Frédilly, a pianist, and her husband, Emile Camus, a physician and collector of Saxe porcelain, crystals, and Japanese art objects. Camus was Degas’s doctor. The couple received their guests at their house at 34, rue Godot-deMauroy, where Degas executed at least three small pastel studies for the final Portrait of Mme Camus at the piano (1869, Foundation E. G. Buehrle Collection, Zurich), showing her at her piano, surrounded by two porcelain

Fig. 5-5 Victoria Dubourg, c. 18689, oil on canvas, cm 81.3 x 64.8, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio

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Fig. 5-6 Mlle Dihau at the piano, 1869, oil on canvas, cm 45 x 32.5, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

figurines, and her music scores. A mirror is on the wall. Her feet rest on a cushion. She looks like a Flemish Madonna, all confined in a cramped space, and whose pallor and delicate refinement Degas is careful to convey. The Goncourt brothers wrote in their journal that Camus, the husband, was just a vulgar man, and their impressions of Blanche’s fragile appearance, that no one had ever seen her eating and judged her to be the chief among her husband’s bibelots.47 Degas did not share this misogynistic attitude. For him, Blanche Camus was an artiste in her own right. She used to play the piano at Auguste Degas’s Monday evenings. In Degas’s second portrait of her, Mme Camus in Red of 1870 (National gallery of Art, Washington DC), Blanche is holding a Japanese fan, surrounded by a statue, a mirror and pieces of furniture in her apartment. Degas identifies her as a woman of taste and signifies her refinement, lightness, and ethereality through the layers of red transparent paint, an oriental atmosphere alluding to the fascination and collecting of chinoiseries then in vogue. Degas’s portraits of Blanche Camus belong in the tradition of the eighteenth-century French portrait of the femme savante, a genre of Dutch origin, especially exemplified by the portraits of Mme de Pompadour painted by François Boucher. The latter invented this portrait type of the learned woman, as an example of the “intellectual portrait,” a pictorial tradition that flourished in eighteenth-century France.48 But Degas’s portraits of these women pianists also detail the history of female pianism in France, albeit indirectly: Degas’s pianists are portrayed in domestic settings, but they assert the visibility of female musicians, and the public appearance and rise of women as professional

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piano composers and performers that had begun in Paris in the late 1840s: while the qualities and repertories of instrumental performance were still gendered, Marie Pleyel and many other female pianists had challenged assumptions about pianistic virtuosity and gained the attention and respect of musical critics in Paris.49 Degas’s portraits of such female pianists and friends of his as Blanche Camus, Marie Dihau (Fig. 5-6), and Suzanne Manet, tell us that for all the accusations of misogyny, Degas in fact had regard for their musical ability and skills, a regard that enabled female independence. The portraits executed by Degas in the 1860s and early 1870s, described above, transport us at once in Degas’s practice of everyday life, and in the spaces of his daily life as a painter. Through mapping Degas, the artist’s life and work project comes to life, a project where mixed artistic sociability, urban itineraries, self-fashioning, and painting were interrelated. The general theme of this project, and of Degas’s oeuvre, is the Parisian artist: Degas painted artists, neighbours in the ninth arrondissement, the district of painters and musicians, circus acrobats, and dancers. Degas’s originality consists in this choice of subject, which appears to be tightly linked to the neighbourhood and to the arrondissement, so much so as to permit us to identify Degas’s sense of Parisian-ness as his perception of belonging to a “subjective neighbourhood,” a sense of Parisian belonging about which Marc Augé has written.50 Amos Rapoport, instead, has established the notion of “subjective neighbourhood.”51 Through mapping Degas, his Parisian-ness and French-ness are shown to be constructed in his attachment to and promotion of the Parisian artist, the pivot of a political and aesthetic discourse on Paris as the “capitale des arts et des artistes, symbole de l’unité de l’histoire et de la puissance du génie national du peuple français,” a discourse which was topical in Degas’s lifetime.52 The Paris Universal Exhibitions of 1855 and 1867 promoted the superiority of France in matters of art, creativity, and taste. This process would culminate with the Universal Exhibitions of 1878, 1889, and 1900, sanctioning the international position of France and of Paris as the homeland of art and luxury, an undertaking that would be accomplished by the Third Republic through its official commitment to and support of the Parisian avant-garde.53 Degas’s painting celebrates the centrality of Parisian-ness and revolves around the cult of the modern Parisian artist within a political, social, and cultural climate which, as it was in the aims of both Second Empire and Third Republic politics, aimed to establish Paris as the capital of the arts and of France as the image of the apotheosis

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of human civilization. It was within this broad frame that Degas was working at his autobiographical project through his iconography.

4. Musical evenings In the family apartment at 4 rue de Mondovi Degas could pursue his observation of his own socio-aesthetic universe for autobiographical purposes. Auguste, who loved music, invited musicians to perform for him, and a few guests on Monday nights. The pianists Blanche Camus and Marie Dihau, and the guitarist Pagans were of this company and Degas painted them all in a series of small portraits styled in the tradition of the French eighteenth-century portraits of musicians and femmes savantes. Mlle Dihau at the Piano (1869, Fig. 5-6), for instance, is reminiscent of François-Hubert Drouais’s Portrait of Mme Favart (1757, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In Degas’s canvas, Marie turns around as she has just delivered her performance. In conferring upon her an interrogative look directed at the audience, one can see that in this portrait Degas has established a correspondence: an instance of empathy runs between the pianist questioning her public about her performance, and himself asking Marie Dihau what she thinks of his performanceDegas’s portrait of her. The Dihaus were a musical family: the three siblings Désiré, Marie, and Henri were all musicians. Marie and Désiré were Degas’s first customers. The little portrait of Marie, who kept it all her life, had a great importance in Degas’s professional career: it was the first painting he sold. In this geographic reading of Degas, I aim to explore what Michael Sheringham has defined as the “productive interaction between city, mind, history and text,” a combination derived from “the relationships between the traversal of urban space, the exploration of subjectivity at grips with the external context and the operations of language.”54 In this framework, Degas’s approach to the city and its private lives, which constitute the object of his painting, has two aspects: the first is Degas’s attempt to win over the city’s resistance to his art; the second is autobiographical in scope, as his portrayal of a special kind of Parisian worker, the bourgeois artiste, applied to Degas himself. This dual enterprise of survival strategy and self-definition consisted in “cornering” artists like himself, in their places. The term “place” can be understood according to Augé’s definition: “I call a ‘place’ a space where individual and collective identities, as well as the relationship between people and the history they share, are so perceptible that anyone could read or decipher them.”55 In this enterprise, Degas’s little portrait of Marie sanctioned a small but essential conquest in Degas’s long “fieldwork campaign.” All

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his life as a painter in Paris’s artistic ninth arrondissement had consisted in trying to establish a reputation by means of social and professional contacts as a way of opening paths and passages, and gaining the field. This field was Paris, with its places and its bourgeois artistes. Entering the art market by selling a portrait after years of unpaid work was a confirmation of Degas’s professional identity, a victory for his strategy of executing voluntary and un-commissioned portraiture. Degas was also able to portray Désiré Dihau, Marie’s brother, who lived close to Degas, in the rue de Laval.56 Désiré was a composer and musician at the Paris Conservatory and at various Parisian concert halls. He was also a bassoonist at the Opéra de Paris, from 1862.57 In this role, as a professional performer Degas portrayed him in around 1869 in The Orchestra at the Opera (Fig. 7-1), one of Degas’s Dutch pictures and the picture that Auguste judged to be Edgar’s “first real painting.” It was exhibited by Durand-Ruel in his window shop on the rue Laffitte, a fundamental step in Degas’s conquest of the city, which will be discussed in chapter five. In The Orchestra at the Opera, Désiré appears in the pit of the theatre, blowing his bassoon among other instrumentalists, while a few ballet dancers, of whom we do not see the heads, perform on stage. A truly Dutch painting, the work confuses the genres of painting, reinvents the spaces of Paris, and puts together people who shouldn’t be associated with each other. As Loyrette has explained, in order to confer upon Dihau his full importance, Degas “does not hesitate to shake up the orchestra in the pit, placing the bassoon in the front row, though it is normally hidden behind a wall of alternating cellos and double basses.”58 Furthermore, of the musicians appearing in the painting, a few were actual musicians of the Paris Opera, while friends and relatives, including Lorenzo Pagans and Edmondo Morbilli, posed others. The cellist seated at the left-hand side is the musician Louis-Marie Pilet, whose portrait Degas also made. In the double portrait of Auguste Degas and Lorenzo Pagans of 187172 (Fig. 1-2) Degas renders the guitarist’s absorption and his father’s pleasure at listening. This work would hang over Degas’s bed-head until his death. Pagans reminds observers of Manet’s bare Spanish Guitarero but here Degas was clearly thinking more of Watteau’s Mezzetin and its dreamy and intimate atmosphere, but lifted out of the parkland setting and inserted in the modest room where paintings and music elicit the conversation of a distinguished Parisian society. With his reference to Watteau, a painter who came from the French Flanders, Degas placed his painting in the tradition of the Parisian eighteenth-century painting. This was undergoing its historicist revival: this had started in England, where

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the connoisseur and art dealer John Smith had published an eight-volume catalogue of Dutch, Flemish, and French Paintings (1829-42), and it now reached France, not only in the writings of Thoré-Bürger and the Goncourt brothers, and in the feminine fashion for Watteau, Rubens, and Van Dyck dresses, but also, close to Degas, in the event of the La Caze bequest entering the Louvre in 1869. Degas is concerned with the bourgeois interior as the space of bourgeois identity, and with its meanings of spiritual dispositions and taste. Degas insists strongly on these themes through his rendering of spaces cluttered with open music scores, pianos, and paintings hung on the walls. This aspect is evident, for instance, in Mme Edmondo Morbilli (1869, private collection), a portrait of his sister Thérèse on a visit to her family in Paris. Degas is very assertive in establishing the relation between the individual and the interior. Thérèse appears in the family drawing room, leaning on the mantelpiece. She is wearing a yellow summer dress and holding a hat in her hands. The paintings hung on the walls, part of Auguste’s small collection, are a conspicuous presence, which the painter leads us to acknowledge by lining them along an axis of perspective. To sum up, Degas’s iconography, his reflection, in painting, on the status and on the spaces of the modern Parisian artist, amounted to a strategic conquest and reorganization of the city that told the spatial story of Degas’s avant-garde engagement. At the height of his spatial story as self-fashioning and auto-biography, we find Degas’s self-portraits, portraits, and double portraits of fellow painters, imbued with ideas of revolution and freedom, as discussed in the following section.

5. Top hats Degas’s voluntary portraiture in the 1860s was an autobiographical strategy to achieve visibility in the contemporary art world and not an indication of his high social status. As described in Chapter Three, Degas’s early portraits and history paintings had been the receptacle of his preoccupation with such issues concerning the modern artist as marriage, social class, and professional status. These concerns are also behind Degas’s iconography, a gallery of portraits built along the painter’s urban itineraries of social and artistic life. Degas’s representation of the modern bourgeois artist was epitomised in his Self-portrait Lifting his Hat and in portraits of his fellow painters, which reflected Degas’s social contacts and his being a painter of painters. In the Self-portrait Lifting his Hat (c. 1863, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon), Degas shows himself against a partly red background similar to that seen in the engagement portrait of his

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sister Thérèse of around the same date. Dressed as a man about town, in a sober dark suit, gloves, and top hat, he subscribed entirely to the Parisian and, according to Baudelaire, truly modern bourgeois aesthetics of dress. The silk hat, we read in the commentaries on Parisian life under Napoleon III written by Le Petit Homme Rouge (nom de plume of the publicist Ernest Vizetelly), was by now “the orthodox headgear of civilization.”59 Just like any other bourgeois, and in keeping with his being, in his own words, a parvenu, Napoleon III ordinarily wore a dark frockcoat and waistcoat, and when he went out in Paris in civilian attire, he wore the orthodox silk hat and-almost invariablySuède gloves of the shade known as pearl-grey. He generally took with him his walking stick, which was of rhinoceros hide with a gold handle figuring an eagle’s head.60

The dark suit, worn universally, signaled the triumph of the bourgeoisie. It was sanctioned aesthetically by Charles Baudelaire’s article, “Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne” published in various newspapers, in slightly different versions, between 1859 and 1863.61 In the article, which was intended as a praise of the modernity of the artist Constantin Guys, Baudelaire had explained his “théorie rationelle et historique du beau, en opposition avec la théorie du beau unique et absolu”: beauty is always composed of two elements, the eternal and invariable, and the relative and circumstantial. Without the second element, which can be “l’époque, la mode, la morale, la passion,” the first element would be “indigestible, inappreciable, non adapté et non approprié à la nature humaine.” For Baudelaire, dress was a carrier of the morals and aesthetics of an epoch, and therefore a means of carrying modernity. In his review of the Salon of 1846 the poet and critic had already paid specific attention to the element of dress as a carrier of modernity. In that review, he had pointed to the fact that painters preferred to paint the past because it was easier. The great tradition, lost and not replaced yet, consisted in the idealisation of ancient life. What about the “epic side” of modern life? Baudelaire argued that modernity offered as many sublime motifs as any ancient epoch, that it had its own beauty made of both the transitory and the eternal, the absolute, and the specific element. One form of expression of modern sensibility (“passions”) that was not to be found in antiquity was suicide. Also, for Baudelaire, the beauty of modern times was in the black suit: N’est-il pas l’habit nécessaire de notre époque, souffrante et portant jusque sur ses épaules noires et maigres le symbole d’un deuil perpétuel? Remarquez bien que l’habit noir et la redingote ont non seulement leur

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In painting, the political value of the bourgeois dress had first been depicted by Delacroix’s painting of the revolutionary days of 1830, Liberty Leading the People (Musée du Louvre) In Delacroix’s painting, the Parisian bourgeois fighting for freedom on the barricades is identified by his dress: redingote, waistcoat, necktie, and top hat. Degas appropriated the poetics and the politics of the top hat in his self-fashioning. In the Selfportrait Lifting his Hat, in fact, particular emphasis is placed on the customary bourgeois dress, which Degas carefully describes. By placing one hand in the side pocket of his trousers, in a studied gesture, the black frockcoat opens on the waistcoat. This is buttoned over a stiff-necked white shirt, whose collar is finished with a bow tie. The dress is complete with its accessories, gloves and top hat, which occupy a prominent place, held mid-air, and meaning the triumph of bourgeois urban rituals.

Fig. 5-7 Portrait of Léon Bonnat, 1863, oil on canvas, cm 43 x 36, Musée Bonnat, Bayonne.

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Fig. 5-8 Portrait of James Tissot, 1867-8, oil on canvas, cm 151.4 x 111.8, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

In his self-portrait of 1863, Degas was asserting his belonging to boulevard culture through the signs of appearance, leaving no doubt that he considered the soberly cut bourgeois dress suitable to his own spirit, to the spirit of the middle class, and to the spirit of his time. The top hat, more often than the paintbrush, identified for Degas the Parisian painter, as it figures prominently in the Portrait of Gustave Moreau and in the 1863 Portrait of Léon Bonnat (Fig. 5.7), whose acquaintance Degas had made in Rome. Born in Bayonne in 1833, at the age of fifteen Bonnat moved to Madrid, where his father managed a French bookshop. In the bookshop, where he had to help, according to his early biographer Achille Fouquier, Bonnat could make up for the fact that he had had to leave school prematurely: “L’histoire des peintres de Vasari, les traductions de livres allemands traitant des beautés de l’art, l’intéressaient par-dessus tout.”63 Bonnat was a cosmopolitan artist and a traveller: he took art classes at the Academia de Madrid, studied Velázquez at the Prado, then went back to Paris, and later to Rome. In 1868 he joined Jean-Léon Gérôme in an expedition to Egypt and Turkey. When he settled in Paris in the early 1860s to become a portrait painter, he spent his time in the Louvre, the Babel where would-be artists could nurture their inclination: Un musée aussi vaste, aussi important que celui du Louvre, qui renferme une aussi grande accumulation de tableaux d’époques et de pays différents, est un sorte de tour de Babel où chaque peintre parle sa langue à lui, celle qui constitue son mérite propre, son individualité. 64

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Living at 48 rue de Bassano, Bonnat had his studio near to Degas, first at 10 rue de la Tour d’Auvergne (in 1861), and then at 23 rue Turgot. In 1863, Degas portrayed him at work in his new studio in the rue NotreDame-de-Lorette (Portrait de Léon Bonnat, in a private collection). A penniless bohemian to begin with, according to Fouquier, Bonnat had become well known in Paris by 1864.65 He worked hard towards academic success, ending up with a studio full of pupils (Caillebotte and ToulouseLautrec among them) in the impasse Hélène. He became a Rembrandt connoisseur and collector, forming his knowledge of Rembrandt during his extensive travel and study in Holland in the 1870s. He had a child from one of his models, but like Degas and like many other artists, he remained a bachelor, and very happy to live all his life with his widowed mother and sister Marie, in a house in place Vintimille. Degas also portrayed another friend and Bonnat’s future brother-in-law, the painter Enrique Melida (1864, Musée Bonnat, Bayonne). Another close friend of the 1860s whom Degas portrayed was the painter James Tissot (Fig. 5-8), the son of a milliner and a marchand de nouveauté from Nantes. Tissot had studied, like Degas, in the studio of Louis Lamothe and they probably met there, or at the Louvre, or through Whistler, whom Tissot had met at the Musée du Luxembourg while both were working in front of Ingres’s Roger Délivrant Angélique. As Tissot’s biographer Michael Wentworth has written, this meeting put Tissot in contact with some of Whistler’s acquaintances, French realists such as Manet, Fantin-Latour, Bracquemond, Legros, Courbet, and the group of English and American friends of Whistler, including George Lucas, George du Maurier, Edward Poynter and Thomas Armstrong. Tissot, a huge anglomane, adopted the name James in 1859.66 Tissot was a successful painter as early as 1859, when five of his paintings were accepted at the Paris Salon. The following year he exhibited at Goupil’s gallery in the rue Chaptal, proving that it was possible to please both the Academy and the boulevard, something other Realists were trying to do. In 1861, at the Salon or from memory, Degas sketched in one of his notebooks from Tissot’s Voie des Fleurs, Voie des Pleurs.67 Representing the danse macabre, this painting was a good example of Tissot’s medieval themes and style, sourced in the Germanic Middle-Ages. In his self-fashioning as a modern Flemish primitive, Tissot often signed his paintings “Jacobus Tissot.”68 Tissot managed to confer vitality to the genre troubadour adopting an originally archaic style and turning for inspiration to the “teutonic antiquarianism” of the painting of the Belgian Henri Leys, who was then establishing a Belgian national school in the Flemish tradition.69 For Wentworth, Tissot’s cult of northern

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painting, Flemish in particular, was linked to his upbringing in medieval cities. Such modern turning to the art of the north was also Tissot’s originality at a time when other painters “were consciously making reference to the art of the past in order to establish the French-ness of their art and their place in their own tradition.”70 While Tissot was certainly operating in an original way through his choice of affiliation to the Flemish tradition, it was the entire Northern European tradition of painting, of which the Flemish was a strand, that was undergoing a revival. The French realists were actually claiming Northern-ness on behalf of their French-ness, a claim meant to detach themselves and their paintings from the other equally French tradition of art, the grand, academic, neo-classical, and Italianate of large format historical narratives. The French realists were claiming a Northern Frenchness deriving in a straight line from the peinture de genre: the descriptive, intimate, and prosaic small-format painting destined to furnish the Parisian domestic interior and especially the hundreds of apartments making the recent Haussmann immeubles.71 If Tissot was original in his modern interpretation of the primitives of the Flanders, so was Degas in his cult for Anthony Van Dyck and his commitment to the Northern Baroque. When in 1867-68 Degas executed his Portrait de James Tissot, the latter had been painting subjects of modern life in the style of the PreRaphaelites and especially of Alfred Stevens.72 He had received a medal at the 1866 Salon and in 1867 he exhibited at the Universal Exhibition. He received commissions from known personalities. Tissot was able to leave his Left-Bank atelier at 39 rue Bonaparte and move in at 64 avenue de l’Impératrice. Degas’s portrait may celebrate just Tissot’s passage to a new studio on the fashionable side of Paris, as well as the studio as the space of creation of modern art. We may see in the work just an “idea of atelier,” as according to Loyrette. But in Degas’s work, the point is that the genres are confused as we are in front of a portrait as much as of a painting of genre: the space is both Tissot’s studio and a symbolic space. In the first case, whether real, invented, or both, this is Tissot’s studio because Tissot is there: he occupies his space sitting on a chair, surrounded by his canvases, the largest one of which, seen in part hanging in the background, is in the genre of the Japonisme, of which he was an adept. Furthermore, sitting symbolically in the middle of the painting and close to Tissot’s head is the Portrait of Frederick the Wise, by Lucas Cranach, a measure of Tissot’s regard for the Northern-European masters. In the second case, this is also a symbolic space: the cramped space full of artworks signifies that the modern urban painter creates in the studio and is inspired by the Old Masters. The space and spirit of modern creation

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were guarded and presided over by the museum and the old masters of Northern Europe. To sanction his Parisian-ness, Tissot’s top hat is sitting on the desk on which he is leaning, while the stick he is holding functions as both a walking stick and a maulstick. For this boulevardier artist, Degas is following the Romantic iconography of the portrait of the melancholic artist in his studio, seen in The Artist in his Studio, once attributed to Géricault, and in Delacroix’s Michelangelo in his Studio.73 Degas’s portrait confirms that the legend circulating in Paris about Tissot living in a fabulous mansion was just a myth created by the press.74 Despite his “unintelligent skull” and his “yeux de merlan cuit,” as Goncourt described them, and even though Tissot, like Manet, was a coureur de femmes and a boulevardier, Tissot remained for Degas a melancholic bohemian.75 In Degas’s iconography, the top hat certainly identifies Manet. The urbane Parisian painter par excellence, the charming friend by all accounts, Manet appears in three drawings known as Edouard Manet seated (see for instance the black chalk portrait of Manet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of c. 1867). Nonchalantly seated in what Loyrette identifies as a “décor d’atelier,” Manet doesn’t pose.76 Degas captures him as effortlessly elegant as he was, in his simple bourgeois dress, his top hat in prominent position. Manet here immediately conjures Paris and the “Ville”: the Right Bank and its boulevards where the emerging commercial art market was located and where cultural debate in Paris was fermenting alongside business and politics. This is how Vizetelly described the area and its exuberant social life at the apogee of the Second Empire: The Boulevards-from the Madeleine to the Faubourg Montmartre-were then in many respects the real centre of Parisian life. Nearly all the greatest restaurants, the Café Anglais, the Maison Dorée, the Café Riche, Durand’s, Brébant-Vachette’s were there; the Trois Frères and Véfour’s being the only really first-class establishments left at the Palais Royal. Excepting the Cercle Impérial, at the corner of the Avenue Gabriel, all the great clubs, too, were either on or near the Boulevards-the Union and the Agricole patronized by the old noblesse, the Jockey by sportsmen and men of fashion, the Chemins de Fer by stockbrokers, great engineers, and directors of public companies, the Union artistique by men who practised or dabbled in the arts, the Ganaches by a great variety of old fogeys, both civil and military, the Baby and the Sporting by very young men intent on sowing their wild oats, the Américain by gamblers, the St. Hubert by devotees of la chasse, and the Cercle des Arts by notaries, commercial people, and other good bourgeois. In those days, too, there were real cafés on the Boulevards, for the Parisian had not taken yet to lager beer. Virtually each café had its habitués, its special class of customers, and if you wished to

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find an actor, a government journalist, an opposition one, an officer on leave, a boursier, a merchant or commission agent in some particular line of business, you knew precisely where to go.

The Boulevards came to life especially “during that hour before dinner time, which is called the Hour of Absinthe,” when “you would meet or see outside one or another café two-thirds of the men whose names had been mentioned in that day’s newspapers.” You could notice Auber talking to Offenbach, Léonce the critic “of the Variétés cracking jokes with Cham the caricaturist,” Lord Hertford, a “bored-looking elderly Englishman” and Turning the corner of the rue Laffitte you espied old Baron James de Rothschild, followed by the eternal footman carrying his overcoat. Lost inside the Librairie Nouvelle stood Prince Metternich purchasing books for the Princess. The mysterious Persian who haunted the Imperial Library strolled by. There went Mustapha Pasha in converse with Khalil Bey. Yonder, sundered by politics but drawn together by art, sat Courbet in the company of Carpeaux. Then, all at once, loud-voiced and exuberant, Dumas of the Musketeers appeared, attended by some of the sycophants on whom he lavished his last napoleons. All the men of the reign might be met at one time or another on those Boulevards, Ponsard, Scholl, Henri de Pène, Dr. Véron, Bressant, Goncourt, Baron Brisse, Villemessant, M. de Foy, Siraudin, Vallès, Barrière, Banville, Sardou, Pereire, GramontCaderousse, Frederick Lemaître, Nadar, Girardin, Rossini, Houssaye, Paul de Kock, Paul Féval, About, Roqueplan, young Rochefort and young Gambetta, mediums Home and Squire, Paul Baudry and Manet, Markowski and Cellarius, Millaud and Mirès and so on, and so on. And as time elapsed vocalists and actresses went by in their victories and broughams-Patti, Nilsson, Alboni, Hortense Schneider, Zulma Bouffar, Léonide Leblanc, Madeleine Brohan, Rose Chéri, La Desclée, Fargueil, and all the others-pending the time when processions of carriages would halt outside the theatres, and ladies alight from them in all the glory of their toilettes de spectacle. 77

Carriages with “ladies of rank and position,” on the way back from the Bois de Boulogne, “the fashionable drive,” rode along other carriages “often the showiest of all, occupied by women of another kind. There went Cora Pearl, Giulia Barucci, Anna Deslions, La Païva, not far from her old acquaintance, Esther Guimond. All the “Dames aux Camélias,” the “Filles de Marbre,” the “Madelons” of the period mingled with the highest in the land, displaying their painted charms and costly costumes.”78 In Second Empire Paris modern life was a diffused free spirit, a mixed society on the Boulevards, unlike in other parts of the city, and in this framework Degas moved and evolved as a man and as a painter, against

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the urban fabric of Paris. Degas had his studio in the rue de Laval, and his way of working acquired a distinct character from the habit of sketching his sitters in their environment and then taking the sketches or notes back to his studio. This was very different from what other artists were doing in the same years. Manet, for instance, painted only in his studio, where his models sat for him. As for Degas, his work of sketching or noting took place at the sitter’s, on site: just what an ethnographer would do. The final artwork would emerge in Degas’s studio, from memory and from the study of the material collected. This was Degas’s way of painting reality and modern life and the establishment of a lifelong artistic practice, creating a practical and mental map integrating his life and his art, linking his social and painterly action across the urban dimension of the artist’s life. We have to imagine the final artwork emerging at the crossroad between the retreat of the artist’s studio and the sketching sessions of its subject which took place in the sitter’s social setting, and the museum reference through which Degas continued to reflect on past art.

Fig. 5-9 Self-Portrait with Evariste de Valernes, 1865, oil on canvas, cm 116 x 89, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

With the passing of time and his affirmation as a professional painter, we see Degas’s Parisian geography shifting: between what his “comprehensive use of the city” in the late 1850s and the apparently aimless flânerie of his later years, stand three decades of Degas’s strategic approach to space like a land to conquer. Degas’s approach to his subjects, Parisians, and therefore to the city of Paris, was strategic, as Degas chose not to look very far for his subjects. Degas, who did not work on demand, portrayed individuals who already were part of his life, his family and his

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acquaintances, in their settings or spaces, which therefore were also his spaces, a closeness which made them all the better to observe. This precise observation of individuals of his own social circles would amount to nothing but the creation of a lifeless and monotonous world, unless we recognised that Degas was actually pursuing in his art a tautology of art and life in the tight interrelation of social and artistic networks, and of urban location, that defines Degas’s art. In his self-fashioning as the painter of Parisian artists, Degas’s pursuit of identity is especially clear in those works in Degas’s iconography in which the portrait and the selfportrait are combined, in which the personal and the social become one concern. An important painting signalling Degas’s concern for social belonging and significant relationships is the Self-Portrait with Evariste de Valernes of 1865 (Fig. 5-9) in which he sits next to his friend and painter from Carpentras, who had at the time a studio in the rue de Seine. The portrait originally showed Degas wearing a top hat, too.79 The work is in the tradition of the Renaissance amity portrait, examples of which Degas had studied when he was in Rome, sketching from Raphael’s Portrait of Andrea Navagero and Agostino Beazzano (1516, Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome) and from Anthony van Dyck’s double portrait of the brothers and painters Lucas and Cornelis de Wael. 80 The self-portrait with Evariste de Valernes foresees such works of the 1870s as Degas’s double portraits (such as his double portrait of Lepic and Marcellin Desboutin etching together, Fig. 9-4) and collaborative works (The Ballet Master, a monotype co-signed by Degas and Lepic, Fig. 9-5). By adopting the genre of portrait known in France as tableau d’amitié and the reference to the Old Masters, Degas alludes in his double portraits of Parisian artists to a bond greater than friendship, an affinity of minds, a kind of brotherhood in art and life uniting the two fellow painters. These works were executed during the years of the Impressionist associations, as we will see in chapter seven of this thesis, where Degas and his colleagues were working closely in the wake of the collaborative tradition practiced by the Old Masters in Holland.81 The issues of fraternity, affinity, collaboration, and impersonation among city artists with which Degas’s self-portraits and portraits are infused, will be discussed in the next section of this chapter

6. Place de la Concorde In 1875, Degas painted Place de la Concorde. Viscount Lepic and his Family (Fig. 5-10).82 This large group portrait reflects few of the issues discussed in this chapter, such as Degas’s reference to Van Dyck in his

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portraiture and the issues of fraternity and impersonation among Parisian artists. This portrait of Ludovic Lepic, his daughters, and their dog is usually viewed as an image of rupture and alienation in the age of capitalism, the portrait of a flâneur and his alienated family lost in the midst of modern Paris, for instance by T. J. Clark and more recently by Hollis Clayson. But in Degas’s Place de la Concorde, place becomes central to the friendship between Degas and Lepic, as portraits and cityscape are inextricable. In Degas’s painting, individual and collective meanings are stored in urban space and the painter fuses urban history with autobiography through evocation and commemoration.

Fig. 5-10 Place de la Concorde. Vicomte Lepic and his Daughters, 1875, oil on canvas, cm 78.4 x 117.5, The State Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

Readings of Place de la Concorde have been offered by Albert Kostenevich,83 Harvey Buchanan,84 Mari Kalman Meller,85 Clayson, and T.J. Clark. Kostenevich’s most important contribution to the interpretation of this painting consists in the identification of the figure appearing on the left-hand side, cut along its length. This is for Kostenevich the portrait of Ludovic Halévy (1834-1908), playwright and close friend of Degas until the outbreaks of the Dreyfus Affair. For Kostenevich, the Lepics “are crossing the Place de la Concorde, coming from the rue de Rivoli, with the Tuileries behind a stone wall. Faintly visible in the corner of the gardens is the statue of Strasbourg by Pradier.” The Alsatian city had been lost to Prussia in 1871. It is clad in black banners. For Kostenevich, the painting “displays movement, in several

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different directions at once, but the purpose of the movement is not shown” and “it is not essential to know whether the Viscount is taking his daughters somewhere in particular or whether he is simply out on his usual constitutional.” He is a flâneur, impeccably dressed, although, Kostenevich finds that it is difficult to know whether he or Degas actually subscribed to dandyism. It is in fact this ambiguity that is “expressed in the composition of Place de la Concorde through the roles assigned to the figures,” in the different directions taken by the father and the children, in the contrasting position to Lepic taken by Halévy, a simple onlooker. Kostenevich concludes by writing that for Degas, who dealt with people and not “with the signs of the new Paris,” the architecture here “was needed only to outline the borders of the square.”86 For Clayson, instead, the painting should be seen in relation to the statue of Strasbourg by James Pradier and the cult of mourning that had arisen around it after the loss of Alsace to Germany in 1871 and had established Place de la Concorde as a ceremonial space in Paris. In the painting the statue is obliterated almost totally by Lepic’s top hat. T. J. Clark has read this detail as the ability of Haussmannisation to hide history, because, as Clark asks rhetorically, “What does the viscount care for history, even recent history, with a cigar wedged firmly between his teeth and an umbrella under one arm at a forty-five degree angle?”87 Clayson wants to read the painting differently from previous comments of “exclusively sociopolitical significance” related to the position of Lepic’s top hat. As she reminds the reader, the square was not only a ceremonial space but also a place for bored Parisians. Furthermore, for her, the point of the image goes back to the Commune of Paris and its meanings can only be teased out by comparison with the triple portrait of Jeantaud, Linet, Lainé. As discussed in a following chapter, Clayson considers the triple portrait as the picture of camaraderie, and wartime male bond, while in Place de la Concorde, where “personal bonds between the two prominent men are missing,” Degas has orchestrated a missed encounter: “the gulf between Lepic and Halévy is a rupture of the male bond.” For Clayson, Degas may be saying that “without the siege and its creation of male community, men are cut off from one another even as they resume dandified urban ritual, and are again hemmed in by and defined by their children and their dogs.” Degas’s choice of the square “was a suitable locus for his staged rumination upon the loss of the treasured if fleeting and rare experience of male community.”88 In reality, Degas’s community engagement was never so intense as in the years following the Franco-Prussian war, the years of the Impressionist exhibitions, and of collaborative printmaking, a community engagement

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that, moreover, was never exclusively male, but included artists such as Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt and Marie Bracquemond. But to return to Place de la Concorde, is Degas here concerned with recent history? Is recent history anywhere in the image more present than remote history? I argue that Degas is not concerned with a general notion of movement, or with void and flatness or with “the loss of male community entailed by the city’s resumption of routine,” as Clayson claims. In the painting appear Lepic ((1839-1889), his two daughters Eylau (born July 1868) and Janine (born September 1869), their dog Albrecht and Ludovic Halévy. For this portrait of a keen anglomane such as Lepic, Degas has chosen to work in the genre of English family portraits or portraits of children and their dogs, of which Van Dyck had painted many examples during his years in England. In Degas’s view, Lepic was not simply a noble d’Empire, but a modern urban aristocrat, namely an artist and a man of taste. Lepic cultivated Northern-ness in his own art as a peintre-graveur of Dutch landscapes and a painter of animals in the Dutch and Flemish tradition. He especially painted dogs, cultivating a connection with the seventeenth-century mania for dogs in the Netherlands and the related genre, dog portraits.89 The portraits are set in one of the public spaces of Paris that most carry political and social meanings of relevance to the national identity, through cultural memories and urban symbolism. Place Louis XV had become Place de la Concorde in 1792 and Place de la Révolution in 1795. In French history from the Revolution onwards, this space is a symbol for the destruction of the monarchy and the rise of a new elite, a new aristocracy. The architect Jacques-Ange Gabriel had conceived a rectangular space with the statue of the King in the centre, closed to the North by two identical buildings, the Garde-Meubles de la Couronne and the hôtel de Crillon, divided by the rue Royale. In 1870-71 the place had become again the centre of national life and republicanism. Degas’s Place de la Concorde preserves layers of meaning that are transpersonal, and national ideas as well as very personal ones, as the location was resonant with memories of a past and glorious life for Lepic and for Degas. Through the inclusion and exclusion of symbols of the urban space and the recovery of biographical and autobiographical meanings Degas articulates a process of identification by which the portrait is made into a portrait of the LepicDegas relationship. In that very same year 1875, Degas and Lepic were collaborating intensely both at printmaking and at the organisation of the Impressionist exhibitions. As will be discussed more in depth in Chapter Seven, they also co-signed a monotype, The Ballet Master, and if that work and their collaboration sanctioned a sort of brotherhood with marked

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dialogical aspects (Lepic taught Degas the monotype technique), Place de La Concorde extends that Northern ideal of closeness in their social and cultural environment and deepens the biographical allusions to the extent that the identification between sitter and artist becomes the work. Lepic and his daughters are not crossing the square, as most comments on the painting agree. First, in the fact that each of them, including the dog, looks in a different direction, we should see Degas’s application of the principle of the Dutch portrait, the notion ‘together-but-separate’ in which individuals portrayed together retain their individuality through gesture and attitude, but undoubtedly form a whole (be it a family, a syndicate, or a guild). In Degas’s work, the Dutch device acquires meanings of modernity and individualism but not of dysfunction and alienation. Secondly, the Lepics are not properly walking or crossing the square. It is obvious that they should be crossing the square in order to be there, but to describe the scene properly they are looking around, surveying the place and thinking about something we can only speculate about. Lepic is possibly thinking of his next journey, appropriately situated by Degas in a place that lends itself to geographic speculation. In Place de la Concorde is found the symbolic centre of France: the eight statues of cities that adorn it represent the eight major cities of France and signal the point of departure of the roads that take the traveller from Paris to those cities. Lepic was a great traveller: he spent only part of the year in Paris, and most of it painting in his studio boat in Berck, in the north of France, or in the Netherlands, in Italy or other locations. There is certainly an allusion to his peripatetic lifestyle in the fact that Degas has placed Lepic in the direction of the statue of Lille, on the way to Berck, to the Flanders and to the Netherlands, which Lepic knew well. But in a historical lieu de mémoire such as Place de la Concorde, it is also possible that Lepic might be thinking of his social standing in the Third Republic. That year his father had just died and Lepic had inherited his title of Viscount, noble d’Empire, while Degas, whose father had also died in 1874, had inherited lots of debts. The presence of Lepic’s two daughters, who were the end of his line, as he was an only child, would have also raised for Lepic questions of memory and death. The Tuileries, in which Lepic had been brought up and lived until 1870,90 were the subject of a parliamentary debate over their reconstruction following the devastation during the Commune. Degas does not place the family near the ruins of the Tuileries palace, which stood untouched until 1883, but in a more meaningful place where the Tuileries are signified, because the painting is not just a portrait of the Lepics, but also of Degas. By placing the Lepics in the corner, Degas could include himself and his own past in

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the picture, giving the painting an autobiographical meaning. This was for Degas no less a place of memory than for Lepic, as Degas made the story of his family start here, in the Place de la Concorde, and somehow also end here: Degas had lived in the rue de Mondovi, round the corner from Place de la Concorde, until the death of his father in 1874. The building at the back is the Ministry of the Marine, to which Achille Degas had belonged as a naval officer until becoming a businessman. Degas and Lepic are one axis of the correspondence between the personal and the collective. Degas places much stress on the fact that these figures are looking around, in this highly symbolic space, locus of societal values and beliefs. Degas’s accurate description of the space belies a thoughtful construction of the relationship between the space and the portraits. But can it be just that? The identification here speaks of family and class belonging and of nation, as the value that defines identity, but these correspond in the painter’s rendition to a discovery or statement around his/their own identity. The city is a man-made environment that stores cultural memory, but also individual memory. Lepic must have been sensitive to the connection between the public space, its celebratory function and his personal history: it is worth considering that his grandfather’s name is engraved on the east wall of the Arc de Triomphe and that in 1864 a street in Montmartre, the rue Lepic, was named in honour of Lepic’s hero grandfather, Joseph-Louis.91 In 1872 some of his art collection and archaeological finds entered the Musée Lepic at Aix-lesBains, of which he was director. 92 To return to the painting, at the center of it is Eylau the child who through her name provided the association with the past. She is the key to the painting. Lepic was an archaeologist whose interest in the archaeology of ancient France must be placed in the context of the regard for and patronage of French archaeology during the Second Empire. Napoleon III’s interest in the field was serious, as the Emperor carried out research and also wrote a biography of Julius Caesar.93 We should regard Anglomania and archaeology as parts of an ensemble specifying and providing the frame for a nationalistic discourse which, in locating its Norman and Saxon roots, was reformulated in antiGerman terms. Lepic was captured at Sedan with Napoleon III. As Colin Jones has written, “the notion that a city is both a site and a community is as old as the Greeks. It follows from this dual recognition that the city’s history lies in the interaction between individuals and time, and between ecology and community” which is especially true in the case of Paris, “one gigantic site of memory.”94

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Lepic spent the winter in Paris, and the rest of the year in Berck-surmer, where he had a studio boat that allowed him to work in front of the sea and the sky. He was named peintre de la Marine in 1881. He was also a decorator and costume designer for the Opera de Paris. When Degas made the portrait, as we will see, Degas was practising collaborative printmaking with Lepic, as well as with Pissarro, Desboutin and others. In this chapter, I have discussed Degas’s bohemianism and his selffashioning as a modern Anthony Van Dyck, as the painter of painters, the painter of artists as modern urban workers. If Degas’s oeuvre was motivated by the myth of the artist, Degas’s original theme, his poetics, was always the modern artist as worker. There is continuity between Degas’s portraits of bourgeois artists of the 1860s and such Degas themes of the 1870s and 1880s as horses, dancers, acrobats, milliners: they are all Parisian artists, urban workers engaged in taking the city, which is the subject of the following chapter.

Notes 1

I follow Jerrold Seigel’s definition of the Parisian “bohemian”: not an artist so dejected to be dressed in rags, but, more subtly, an artist that lives in conditions of economic uncertainty: Seigel, 1987. 2 See Browse, 1949 and DeVonyar & Kendall, 2002. 3 See Loyrette, 1991. 4 Courbet painted above all his writer friends (Baudelaire, Castagnary, Proudhon, Vallès, Champfleury, among others), musicians (Berlioz), artists, and patrons (Bruyas). What they all had in common with Courbet was their republicanism: Doesschate Chu, 2007, pp. 45-8. 5 See Larsen, 1972 on the relationship between Van Dyck and the Cavalier Poets at the court of Charles I. Moreau was not as keen on Van Dyck as Degas was, but Moreau was nevertheless a friend and protégé of Fromentin, for whose ideas on Northen schools of art he may have acted as a catalyst for Degas. The writings of Fromentin, Théophile Thoré and Hyppolite Taine, who, as Michael North has written, “thought that the Dutch school was the historical foundation of the art of their time,” are credited with providing the terms for the Realist debate in France in the nineteenth century: North, 1997, p. 5. In 1876, Fromentin would publish Les Maîtres d’autrefois. 6 See Notebook 13, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 78-83. 7 Degas chose Van Dyck as his reference even in such a group portrait as Place de la Concorde. Viscount Lepic and his Family, of 1875. In the reference to Van Dyck’s English family portraits and portraits of children and their dogs, Degas’s group portrait casts the Lepics like a family of modern urban aristocrats, that is, penniless artists and people of taste. Lepic was not just a huge Anglo-mane but actively cultivated Northern-ness in his own art as an engraver and as a painter of

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Dutch landscapes and animals in the Flemish tradition. The portrait is set in the most urban of Parisian contexts, the Place de la Concorde, and has been read as an image of rupture and alienation in the age of capitalism (see for example the readings of T. J. Clark or H. Clayson) because each of the three members of the Lepic family and even their dog Albrecht looks in a different direction. I will devote more space to this portrait in the following, but here it is worth recalling that in this work Degas has applied the essentially modern feature of the Dutch group portrait residing in the notion “together-but-separate,” whereby the individuals who are portrayed in it appear together, and undoubtedly form a whole (a family, a syndic or a guild), but each looks in a different direction, signifying his freedom as an individual. In Degas’s use, this device acquires meanings of modernity and individualism, but not of disjunction and alienation. 8 Knackfuss, 1899, pp. 42-7 and pp. 52-7. 9 See McCauley, 1985, pp. 151-72. 10 In editions of the Iconographia that appeared after Van Dyck’s death, other portraits were added to the original core by each successive publisher: in his edition of 1646, Gillis Hendrickx added twenty portraits and a title page featuring Van Dyck’s self-portrait. The 1759 edition published in Amsterdam and Leipzig by Arkstée and Merkus consisted of a tome of 124 portraits and a tome of biographical notices concerning the artists portrayed. 11 North, 1997, p. 43. 12 See Vizetelly, 1912, pp. 370-371. Also see: Boulenger, 1932; Halévy, 1935, and Boulenger, 1925 for scenes and characters of the life at the court of Napoleon III. 13 Vizetelly, 1912, pp. 262-63. Also see Halèvy, 1935, I, pp. 69-70. 14 Vizetelly ,1912, pp. 282-83. 15 Degas, 1988, p. 44. 16 see Degas, 1988, p. 122. 17 Sickert, 1917. 18 See Loyrette, “Still Life,” in Tinterow and Loyrette, 1995, p. 156 and Stevenson, 2007. Also see Degas, 1988, p. 127. 19 See on still-life painting: Sterling, 1952; Bryson, 1990; Berger jr., 2011. 20 See Doesschate Chu, 1975. Also consider the tradition of terata (freaks) portraits (of court dwarfs for example) in the painting of the Baroque age. 21 See Minervino, 1970 for the Portrait of Bellet du Poisat (1866-67, oil on panel, cm 39 x 31). 22 See Cutting, 2006. 23 See Lemoisne, 1912; Rivière, 1935 and Tabarant, 1947. 24 Léon Koëlla was the son of either Auguste or Edouard Manet, who adopted him. 25 Wilson-Bareau, 1991, p. 12. 26 See Moreau-Nélaton, 1926 and Vollard, 1924. 27 See Vanzype, 1936 and Coles, 1977. 28 Lacambre, 1998, and Brown, 1990. 29 As she wrote, “This book grows on you, just as Monsieur Degas told me it would…”: Morisot, 1986, p. 32. 30 Morisot, 1986, p. 32.

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31 See Morisot, 1986, p. 40 for Manet’s opinion on the subject of Degas’s flirting skills. 32 The fan is known as Danseurs et musiciens espagnols (L. 173). For Reff, the portrait of Musset serenading a woman with a guitar was Degas’s reference to his own “practising a playful, appropriately artistic form of courtship.” For Reff, Degas “must have been persuasive, at least artistically” because Berthe copied the fan in some of her watercolours and reproduced it prominently in a double portrait she painted that year: see “The Artist and the Writer,” in Reff, 1976 a, pp. 147-99. See on Degas’s fans especially: Gerstein, 1982. 33 Marrinan, 2009, p. 236. The fan is conserved at the Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris. 34 See Gerrish Nunn, 2004. 35 Morisot, 1986, p. 33. 36 Morisot, 1986, p. 36. 37 Mlle Lisle et Mme Loubens, c. 1870, oil on canvas, cm 85 x 97, Art Institute, Chicago. Two studies of the heads for this portrait are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: Mlle Lisle (ca 1870, pastel and charcoal, cm 21 x 26) and Mme Loubens (ca 1870, pastel and charcoal, cm 24 x 20). 38 Conserved at the Los Angeles County Museum and at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, respectively. 39 Morisot, 1986, p. 37. 40 See Degas, 1988, p. 149. 41 Morisot, 1986, p. 38. 42 Morisot, 1986, p. 40. 43 Morisot, 1986, p. 40. Also see Brown Price, 1991for further comments on Puvis de Chavannes’s infatuation with Berthe, the circumstances of her rejection of him, and the bearings of these psychosexual relationships on the caricatural aspect in the art of Puvis de Chavannes. 44 When Yves left Paris, she remembered the sketching sessions with Degas and on 26 June 1869 she wrote to Berthe from Limoges: “As mother must have told you, my dear Berthe, Monsieur Degas took up all of my time during the final days of my stay in Paris, with the result that I have neglected my correspondence…The drawing that Monsieur Degas made of me in the last two days is very pretty, both true to life and delicate, and it is no wonder that he could not detach himself from his work. I doubt if he can transfer it onto the canvas without spoiling it. He announced to mother that he would come back one of these days to draw a corner of the garden, and to tell her shocking stories, for he is absolutely amazed at her guilelessness…” : Morisot, 1986, p. 41. 45 Berthe Morisot wrote to Edma Pontillon: “Monsieur Degas has sent a very pretty painting, but his masterpiece is the portrait of Yves in pastel. I am sorry that you did not see it during your stay here.”: Morisot, 1986, p. 51. 46 See Kane, 1988-1989. 47 Goncourt, 1956, X, p. 156. 48 See Conisbee, 1981 on the intellectual portrait in eighteenth-century France and Goodman, 2000 on the femme savante portrait type.

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See on female pianism: Ellis, 1997. See Marc Augé, “Paris and the Ethnography of Contemporary World,” in Sheringham, 1996, pp.175-9. 51 See Rapoport, 1969 and Rapoport, 1977. 52 See Genet-Delacroix, 1992, p. 9. 53 On the uniquely French case of officialisation of the avant-garde, see Silverman, 1989. Also see Green, 1987 on the artistic policy of the Third Republic. 54 Michael Sheringham “City Space, Mental Space, Poetic Space: Paris in Breton, Benjamin and Réda,” in Sheringham, 1996, pp. 85- 114. 55 Marc Augé, “Paris and the Ethnography of Contemporary World,” in Sheringham, 1996, pp.175-9. 56 As Marie Dihau told Marcel Guérin, Degas and Désiré had met at the Mère Lefebvre, a restaurant in the rue de la Tour d’Auvergne: Guérin, 1923. The Dihaus were friends of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), also living close by and who was able to see Degas’s artworks in their apartment in the rue de Laval. There began Toulouse-Lautrec’s veneration for Degas. Toulouse-Lautrec portrayed the three Dihaus. 57 See Jansen, 1977. 58 Degas, 1988, pp. 161-3. 59 The silk hat was worn by all middle class male citizens, and by women riders. It could be of “exceedingly” varied heights, wrote Vizetelly, and chosen according to taste, function and, naturally, fashion. In 1866-67, a few years after Degas’s selfportrait was painted, the fashion for boulevardiers was to wear “diminutive silk hats, which suggested the ‘cut-downs’ of a slop-shop” with “the tightest of trousers and the shortest of jackets-the last leaving the seat of the trousers fully exposed.” The straw hat, “somewhat quaint,” was worn “with the ribbon fastened behind, and its ends dangled some inches below the brim.” The frockcoat “underwent repeated modifications; at times its sleeves were very tight, at others most awkwardly full, while the skirts generally ended above the knees. With respect to trousers, virtually every huge check-pattern that could be devised, figured for years on the Boulevards.”: Le Petit Homme Rouge, 1912, p. 320-1. On the top hat also see Henderson, 2000. 60 Le Petit Homme Rouge, 1912, p. 134. 61 Baudelaire, “ Le Peintre de la vie Moderne,” in Œuvres Complètes, 1954, pp. 881-920. 62 Baudelaire, “ Le Peintre de la vie Moderne,” in Œuvres Complètes, 1954, pp. 882-3. 63 Fouquier, 1879, p. 4. 64 Fouquier, 1879, p. 17. 65 “A partir de 1864, la classe du Parisien ami des arts qui suit les expositions de peinture, les théâtres, le mouvement littéraire, et s’égare aussi plus ou moins dans la politique, se familiarisa avec le nom de Bonnat.”, wrote Fouquier, 1879, p. 90. 66 Whistler and Tissot remained friends until 1877, the year of the Ruskin-Whistler trial. Their friendship was broken when Tissot refused to testify on Whistler’s behalf: see Wentworth, 1984, pp. 15-6. 50

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Notebook 18, in Reff, 1976 b, pp. 92-102. For Reff, it is “a free copy, probably done from memory.” 68 Wentworth, 1984, pp. 22-4. 69 Wentworth ,1984, p. 28. 70 Wentworth, 1984, p. 22 and p. 25. 71 The triumph of the descriptive and decorative tradition over the narrative and celebrative spoke for the shift of the political centre and the triumph of the bourgeoisie in the Paris of the 1860s, just as it had spoken for the triumph of the bourgeoisie in the Netherlands of the 1660s, to establish a historical parallel of which the nineteenth century was conscious. In the Paris of the 1860s, the decline of the heroic mode of painting, the Versailles mode, was achieving its historical course begun at the end of the eighteenth century, when it was replaced in the Parisian culture by what Katie Scott has described “a taste for gallantry”: see Scott, 1995. 72 Alfred Stevens was also an extremely popular painter, who had created a demand “for genre pictures of stylish women in contemporary settings” in the tradition of eighteenth-century rococo painters who “offered him ideal models for the portrayal of modern sentiment and the cult of women.” Wentworth 1984, p. 55. 73 The theme of the melancholic artist derives from The Rich Man and Death (1553), a popular print of the anonymous artist now known as Monogrammist A I. Degas’s portrait is also close to Savoldo’s Self-portrait in the Louvre (1531-32), which was in the past attributed to Titian and, in Degas’s times, to Giorgione: see Cox-Rearick, 1972, p. 41. 74 Champfleury had written in “La Vie Parisienne” on 21 November 1869: “La dernière originalité qui doit être signalée est l’ouverture de l’atelier japonais d’un jeune peintre assez richement doté par la fortune pour s’offrir un petit hôtel dans les Champs Elysées.” (see Champfleury, 1973, 143). Despite what Champfleury had written, according to Georges Bastard, Tissot lived a decorous and simple life, meeting sitters, collectors and a few intimate friends, such as Degas, Meissonnier and Heilbuth: Bastard, 1906, pp. 260-1 and Wentworth 1984, p. 58. 75 See Goncourt, 1954, p. 1112. According to Wentworth, Manet and Tissot were also “temperamentally somewhat alike, probably more so than Tissot and Degas, and took pleasure in one another’s company over a long period. Each was always ambitious for official recognition and fashionable success, a trait in both which infuriated Degas.”: Wentworth,1984, p. 16. 76 Loyrette, 1991, pp. 218-20. 77 Vizetelly, 1912, pp. 321-2. 78 Vizetelly, 1912, p. 323. 79 For the Self-Portrait with Evariste de Valernes (oil on canvas, cm 116 x 89, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) see Degas, 1988, p. 112. 80 See Notebook 7, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 53-5 and Notebook 11, in Reff, 1976 b, pp. 67-73. On the tableau d’amitié, see Cox-Rearick, 1972, p. 40; Dussler, 1971, pp. 44-7, Filedt Kok, 1996, and Beuzelin, 2009. Also see the discussion of Raphael’s friendship portraits in Henry and Joannides, eds., 2013, pp. 260-303,

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and particularly of Raphael’s Self-Portrait with Giulio Romano (1519-20, Musée du Louvre) at pp. 296-300. 81 They undoubtedly knew the collaborative works executed by Rubens and Brueghel, Van Dyck and Jan Roos, Rembrandt and Jan Gillisz. van Vliet, as well as by Ingres and Marius Granet. 82 This painting was considered lost for many decades until it resurfaced from the Special Storage of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, where it is now available to the public. The canvas had been taken from the family of the German Jewish collector Otto von Gerstenberg during the Second World War, left Berlin and arrived in the Soviet Union as unofficial war reparation: Kostenevich, 1995, p. 12 and pp. 17-8. 83 For Kostenevich, the painting is both an unusual portrait and a “scene of Parisian life in which the cityscape plays too active a role to serve as background,” because the square itself seems to have become a protagonist. The Place de la Concorde, he notices, is quiet and empty and the painting is created “not so much to reproduce a particular subject as to render intuitive, private moments.”: Kostenevich, 1995, p. 68. 84 For Buchanan, Lepic and his daughters in Place de la Concorde “appear isolated, divided, almost oblivious of one another –they move in opposite directions” while being “indissolubly linked by posture, facial expression and clothing. Their propinquity is manifest. In his portraits Degas often used tensions and conflicts between the sexes and generations to probe character, but only in the intimate pictures of his own family did he succeed so convincingly and with such wit, as in Place de la Concorde.”: Buchanan, 1997. 85 For Kalman Meller, writing in 2003, Lepic, wih his daughters, “is crossing the place, leaving the square behind him” and “the whole picture is essentially determined by the obliquity of its principal figure. Elegant, mundane, slightly odd, self-controlled but distracted, the Vicomte projects the transitoriness of street life, in which fragments of the scene emerge and vanish swiftly, seen by chance. The protagonist’s linear placement entails movement, disjunction, separation.” For Meller, by placing Lepic against the square “vast and bare, a huge body of emptiness,” Degas “draws us not so much to the man but the bare street, not the human being, Lepic, but indifferent space, the void.” Degas’s painting conveys “the ephemera of everyday life in the heart of Paris,” where “With piercing grace and unsparing elegance he gave plasticity to the passing figure of his friend, neither a hero nor an anti-hero when seen in the light of ‘ce jour là’ Nothing could be more real or more modern.”: Meller, 2003. 86 Kostenevich, 1995, p. 72. 87 Clark, 1985, p. 75. 88 Clayson, 2002, pp. 336-42. 89 See for instance: Hondius, Joris Hoefnagel, A. F. Desportes, Oudry, and above all, in the English context, John Wootton, and John Caius Of English Dogges (1576). Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature. 90 See Buchanan, 1997.

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91 Edouard Drumont would write a paragraph about Lepic the exemplary French warrior in 1886: “A Auerstaedt, au moment où le baron Lepic, qui mourut comte à Eylau, levait son épée pour charger à la tête de son regiment de dragons, la jugulaire de son casque se détacha et le casque roula à terre. Les officiers ne voulurent pas charger la tête couverte quand leur chef chargeait tête nue, ils deferent leur casque à la hate. Les soldats, avec cet admirable instinct de raffinement dans l’héroïsme qui est inné dans l’âme française, jetèrent précipitamment leur casque à leur tour. Et les Russes stupéfaits virent arrive sur eux, bride abattue, l’éclair aux yeux, les cheveux aux vent, ce regiment qui, par une sublime coquetterie, voulait combattre tête nue comme son colonel…”: Drumont, 1886, p. 40. 92 See Buchanan, 1997. 93 See Buchanan, 1997. 94 Jones, 2004, pp. xvi-xxi.

CHAPTER SIX TAKING THE CITY

1. The Louvre and the city This chapter will discuss Degas’s takeover of the city, his appropriation of such spaces of Parisian avant-garde practice as the Louvre, the cafés, and the rue Laffitte, and how, through the Impressionist installations of 187486, private spaces were appropriated and re-invented by Degas and the other artists of the avant-garde as interior-like exhibition venues. Degas was settled in the studio at 13 rue de Laval, and working on his history paintings, when he met Manet. According to anecdote, they met at the Louvre in front of the Infanta by Velázquez, a painting of which Manet was fond and in front of which Degas was engraving straight into a copperplate. Manet, who did not know Degas, arrived on the scene and, tapping him on the shoulder, commented on Degas’s boldness in engraving directly from the painting. This was something, Manet added, that he wouldn’t dare do himself. According to the primary sources, this event took place in 1862.1 Relying on the fact that Degas registered to copy at the Louvre in January 1862, writers accept this date, although Degas is not mentioned in Manet’s correspondence before 1868.2 It is conceivable that it might have taken years for the two artists to become acquainted, but it is also highly probable that Degas already knew Manet before their encounter in the Louvre. Regardless of the precise date of their meeting, the question of the encounter and friendship between them is important. The preferred image of Degas in the literature is that of the son of a wealthy banker and the conservative young man who, having decided to embark on an artistic career, and not needing to sell artworks, chose to remain occupied well into the 1860s with Ingres, classical references recalled from his Italian tour, and history paintings, until he met Manet, the painter of modern life.3 By mapping Degas, this study shows a different Degas, a bohemian who existed with or without the influence of Manet. Another preferred image in the literature regards Manet and Degas as having in common their high-bourgeois status.4 They were, instead, very different kinds of bourgeois, and as artists they had very different

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working practices.5 Not only was Degas’s supposedly high-bourgeois status increasingly threatened by his family’s failing merchant-banking (which would eventually lead to poverty and debt), but Degas himself, in following his artistic vocation, consciously embraced the struggling existence of the modern artist, joining the crowd of thousands of Parisian painters desperate for exhibition opportunities, venues, and patrons. The legend surrounding Degas has blurred the fact that in his life Degas, a bourgeois, did not pursue either family interests or wealth making, but assumed, even verbally on occasions, a very anti-bourgeois stance and the marginal life-style of the bohemian artist.6 The proof of Degas’s bohemianism is that he managed to fashion his own reputation through his artworks, as the bourgeois and Parisian painter par excellence, the painter of the Opera and of the ballerinas. Sacha Guitry’s black-and-white image of the old Degas, filmed unbeknown to him in Ceux de chez nous (1915) while walking on a Paris boulevard in his top hat, cane, and black suit, has carved in stone our notion of the supremely Parisian painter of the Paris Opera. Other readings of Degas, such as those of T. J. Clark and Armstrong, present him as a riddle, defying understanding, a position that only adds to the cult of the artist, in its emphatic view of Degas as an exceptional human being. It is the argument of this study that Degas was a bohemian, and that Degas the conservative bourgeois is a fiction perpetuated by art history. This fiction was perpetuated by a genre of writing in the history of art that promoted the myth of the artist and was facilitated by the artist’s very bohemianism. As Jerrold Seigel has pointed out in his history of Parisian bohemianism, one of the distinctive conditions of Parisian nineteenthcentury modernity is the difficulty in separating bourgeois from bohemian, because the two conditions are not in opposition, but “were, and are, parts of a single field: they imply, require, and attract each other.” If certain social types were “recognizably not bourgeois: the established aristocrats, the proletarian poor,” there was a wide territory in between, in which the most diverse existences were possible through “the appropriation of marginal life-styles by young and not so young bourgeois, for the dramatization of ambivalence toward their own social identities and destinies.” This ambivalence, at the heart of bourgeois life and at the heart of modernity, could also be felt by individuals who were not artists or writers, Bohemia being “a strangely assorted grouping,” of “shady but inventive characters” including “eccentrics, visionaries, political radicals, rebels against discipline, people rejected by their families, the temporarily or permanently poor.” Bohemian artists lived out the uncertainty and conflicts inherent in the bourgeois life, either deprecating the modern

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condition which deprived them of the aristocratic support which gave them “the leisure necessary to develop his talents by the need to earn his bread,” or accepting them in the understanding that “only under modern conditions could the artist really live from his work and thereby be free of the personal subjection that had oppressed him in the past.” As Seigel has noted, most histories of art emphasise the narrative of the artists victim of new market relations, neglecting that figures like Hugo, Balzac, Lamartine, Sand, and Delacroix, achieved success and recognition and a “degree of liberation and independence” unknown to artists working to please their social superiors.7 What points above all to Degas’s bohemian individualism and selffashioning attitude is the autobiographical enterprise that delineates itself when we look at the self-portraits and portraits executed by Degas in the 1860s under the inspiration of Anthony van Dyck’s Iconographia. Secondly, by the time he met Manet, Degas had already engaged in an avant-garde project with his Anglophile race-track and beach scenes. From his position as the champion of modernity, a position abetted by his urbanity, witty liveliness, and natural charm, Manet acknowledged Degas not without tension. Just as he divulged his view of Degas as “incapable of loving a woman,” Manet liked to point out that he had embraced the themes of modern life in full while Degas was still concerned with history paintings.8 In reality the two painters had very different working practices and their relationship was more complex, and Degas was more independent of Manet’s influence, than is commonly thought. This geographic and biographic approach to mapping Degas’s life and work investigates the whereabouts, both actual and symbolic, of the artist. What is Degas doing in certain places of the city? The resulting interpretation of Degas is that he was neither a classicist artist nor a conservative bourgeois, but an avant-garde artist of progressive ideals looking not to the Southern and classical models but to the art of Northern Europe, especially that of the Golden Age.9 The bourgeois painters of the French avant-garde perceived Northern realism, whether Dutch, Flemish, or English as a carrier of modern and progressive values in an individualistic and nationalistic approach to culture that the Prussian defeat of France in 1870 would encourage, but which was already strong during earlier decades. The story of the encounter between Manet and Degas takes us to the question of the museum as the privileged site for the avant-garde practice of appropriation and interpretation of the sources of art carried out by nineteenth-century avant-garde artists. In this chapter, I will compare the working practices of the two individuals to argue that they were conspicuously different. While exhibiting at the 1860 Salon,

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where he would earn a honourable mention for his Spanish Singer, Manet exhibited regularly at Louis Martinet’s gallery on the boulevard des Italiens. Degas knew the gallery, which also acted as the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Manet usually exhibited his works at the commercial gallery just prior to the spring Salon, in a tactical, self-advertising move through which he sought renown among the boulevard public that would subsequently attend the Salon. Manet wanted to be famous in Paris.10 This self-promotional strategy was an important aspect of Manet’s ambition, aiming at gaining official recognition for his new and unconventional art in the traditional settings of the Salon, where he would have to withstand the Academy’s judgment. Avant-garde artists who had bypassed the teaching of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, such as Delacroix and Courbet, Manet, Degas, Monet and Whistler, had much in common with the academic artists of this period: they both aimed at the Salon. The former, however, did not see it as a means to gain the prestige of official patronage that, in any case, was a scarce commodity, but rather more as a means of gaining recognition. Also, both avant-garde and academic artists spent a long time in the museum, in front of the sources. The new art originated in the traditional institution of the museum, where the avant-garde artists freed themselves not of the model offered by past art, but rather of the mediation between new and historical art which was imposed as a model by the Academy through the hierarchy of genres. This mediation was now felt to be pointless by many artists and critics alike. According to Patricia Mainardi, the principal aesthetic division in France was between the Academy and other parties, in what was “a political conflict, not an aesthetic one.”11 The Academy’s normative action was perceived by avant-garde artists as a relic of the Ancien Régime, while the Louvre, as Reff has written, became their actual school, one “without competitions, exercises, and narrow doctrines, where the solutions to the problems of figurative composition which faced them could be studied in the work of masters congenial to their own taste and temperament.” Self-taught artists crowded the Louvre, copying the great works according to a century-old traditional practice of French art schools.12 From the outset, then, we find Degas and other artists critically at work on the substance of the national tradition, forming themselves as artists within the museum, one of those places in the city that contain traditional canons and embody cultural and political identity. At the moment of his meeting with Manet, Degas was a history and portrait painter, and also worked at racetrack scenes. Manet, as his friend Antonin Proust recalled, despised history painting and those artists who would rather shut themselves in the studio with models, costumes, and

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accessories, to paint a “dead picture” when there were so many living things to look at outside.13 Manet and Degas found a common ground in the Spanish gallery at the Louvre, a common ground which would in time lead Degas to abandon history painting to pursue a search for truth that, in the wake of Courbet, Manet defined as very French: car, il n’y a pas à dire, nous avons en France un fonds de probité qui nous ramène toujours à la vérité, malgré les tours de force des acrobates. Regarde les Le Nain, les Watteau, les Chardin, David lui-même. Quel sens du vrai!14

The urge to relate, in the name of realism and truth, the newest French art to the non-classical strand of French art and to Dutch art was felt by artists, critics, collectors, and dealers, also. In August-September 1860 the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts was the venue for the Exposition de tableaux de l’Ecole française ancienne tirés de collections d’amateurs, which Thoré reviewed in the Gazette des Beaux Arts. A few of the paintings on show were owned by Degas’s acquaintance, Dr La Caze. In his “Nouvelles recherches sur la vie et l’oeuvre des Frères Le Nain,” which appeared in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in November 1860, the critic Champfleury, a long-term supporter of Courbet’s art, wrote that it would be good today to disregard Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard and pay attention to a more glorious French school of painting-Clouet, Poussin, Champaigne, Le Nain.15 There was agreement that the key to the regeneration of art lay in the Golden Age of the pre-revolutionary past preserved in the Louvre, a huge avant-garde worksite, where many of the friendships amongst the avant-garde artists of the 1850s-1870s were formed. Manet and Fantin-Latour met there in 1857, while both were copying the Venetians. Fantin-Latour would introduce Manet to an American painter, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, whom he had met in the Louvre, and who was a fellow student at Gleyre’s atelier in the rue de Vaugirard. In the Louvre, in front of a painting by Correggio, FantinLatour also met his future wife and first biographer, the Parisian still-life painter Victoria Dubourg, already a friend of Manet and Degas.16 Manet would then introduce Whistler to Stevens. In 1861, through Fantin-Latour, Manet would also make the acquaintance of the two Morisot sisters, Berthe and Edma, soon to be pupils of Camille Corot.17 The Louvre was a space open to all painters, academic and avant-garde alike. They differed only in the way their relationship to past art was experienced: unlike the academic artists, the new painters faced their artistic heritage without mentors, without the mediation of an institutional artistic education. In order to freely appropriate their past in this manner, the avant-garde of

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Parisian bourgeois painters felt obliged to invade the city, in both a literal and symbolic sense. Through mapping Degas and his place among these artists, in what follows we will consider how the concepts of spaces and identity intersect, as the artists’ appropriation of their past and history was realised through their appropriation of the city places that both guarded and symbolised that past. These were both the public places of the city, such as the Louvre and the Cabinet des Estampes, and the private collections. The New Paris Guide published by the Galignani brothers in 1866, for instance, mentioned various private collections of modern and ancient art accessible upon written request by the interested visitors. One could visit the collection of the Marquis of Hertford, at 1 rue Taitbout; the collection of the Count d’Espagnac, at 27 rue de Clichy; and the collection of M. La Caze, at 118, rue du Cherche-Midi, which Degas knew since his youth.18 But the appropriation of one’s past could also take place in symbolic spaces, rather than physical, but no less monumental, ideological, and urban, such as could be a book of art history. As Reff has written, it was Charles Blanc’s Histoire des Peintres, the first comprehensive and illustrated history of European painting from the Renaissance down to the present, first published in instalments between 1849 and 1876, that provided artists such as Manet with “specific means” of coming into contact with past art, specific visual sources to draw on and “the biographical sources with which they were linked and which also shaped his image of the masters he admired.” As Reff concluded, the simultaneous appearance of Blanc’s history of painters and of Manet’s history paintings was “not so much a fortunate coincidence as a product of specific cultural conditions, in which the foundations of modern art history and those of modern art were laid down together.”19 From such considerations two important conclusions are drawn. The first is that through the free and confident appropriation of such urban and national institutions as the Louvre or the Cabinet des Estampes (an appropriation which will become reality with the Paris Commune), the avant-garde bourgeois artists were claiming possession of a certain section of the nation’s heritage and, at the same time, were declaring their distinctive French-ness, or Parisian-ness, by redirecting the course of French art. The second conclusion to be drawn is that, if artists of very different backgrounds could find artworks to reject as well as artworks that suited their sensibility in the Louvre galleries, then the Louvre was really fulfilling its revolutionary and universalistic mission of educating all citizens in freedom while embodying notions of French-ness and Parisianness centred on the idea that the symbolism of art and luxury goods is the

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very essence of the French nation’s power.20 The Louvre, refurbished in 1851 to display more artworks from more schools of painting, and designed to welcome more visitors, undoubtedly was a privileged urban site of artistic discussion and dissension. As Hans Belting has written, The myth of the museum fostered a myth of the work that the artist had either to subject himself to or else utterly reject. Was it simply a coincidence that the Paris school became the leading artistic force in the first century of the museum? Did the presence of the Louvre, a contradictory presence in the midst of the most advanced city life of the time, imprint itself on the developing conflict between art’s vanguard and academicism?21

One could continue Belting’s line of thought, and answer his rhetorical questions, by arguing that it was in fact the presence of the Louvre with its enormous collections displaying the whole history of art sitting magnetically in the centre of the city that provided the ground for the confrontation of different ideals of art and for the appearance of avantgarde art. Avant-garde art was born when individuals such as Courbet, Manet, Monet, and Degas, broke from the traditional Ecole des BeauxArtsĺSalonĺMuseum circuit and, self-taught in the galleries of the Louvre, created their own public urban circuit. The fact that the boulevards (with the Impressionist exhibitions, for instance) became a privileged site of the meeting between the artist and the larger public also confirms that in Paris revolutions normally occur in the streets. Such taking of public spaces on the part of these painters can be read as their way of claiming a presence and a citizenship, and as another political revolution in a phase of political transition that brought about the end of the old art patronage institutions. As Seigel wrote, and as we have seen in analysing Degas’s bohemianism, in such historical conditions there were artists who deprecated modernity, which left them to struggle alone without supporting patronage, while others understood that modernity meant freedom from personal subjection, liberation, and independence. Not being able to rely for survival on what the State had to offer, both in terms of reception at the Salon and commission of celebratory artworks for the needs of the establishment, meant that artists working in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century were aware of the necessity of competing for public acknowledgement. In mapping the Paris art world of those days, it becomes clear that the questions of modernity and bohemianism are bound with the question of Paris as street revolution, to recall Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson’s Paris as Revolution. While being aware of their new freedom, modern artists had to face material difficulties. To do this, they formed groups, societies, and networks whose

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collective character and interventions on an urban scale reinforced the affinity and solidarity of their action while preserving their individuality as artists. The return to France of many émigrés from Britain and the widespread Anglophilia in nineteenth-century France had a decisive influence on the diffusion of the French equivalent of the English club, the cercle, defined by Maurice Agulhon as the self-managed form of social interaction typical of a bourgeois society and of a liberal class formed of equals among equals. If the cercle had become by 1880 one of the French “national structures,” a common institution in a liberal country, it was born as a partisan and liberal practice reflecting the modern “collectivization of life.”22 The coexistence of all these elements constituted a uniquely varied and challenging environment, the nineteenth-century modernity of the Parisian cityscape, in which Degas was fully engaged not just as a modern but also as a bohemian artist. To protect their interests through a professional organisation, modern Parisian artists had been associating since 1844 at latest, when Baron Taylor founded the Association des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, architectes, graveurs et dessinateurs. Associations of artists and dealers also existed, such as the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs.23 In the transition between the age of academies and the age of the art dealer-critic system, an age which JeanPaul Bouillon views as a “temps des sociétés,”24 the sense for the collective was alive in ephemeral and unofficial groups of artists such as the evanescent Société des Trois (Fantin-Latour, Whistler, and Legros), the Société du Jing-Lar, the Vilains Bonhommes or the Cercle Zutique (Verlaine, Rimbaud).25 A few artists of these avant-garde, if not underground, societies became members of the most famous of all of them, the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc. It lasted only one year, but some of its members, Degas at the forefront, co-operated until 1886 in mutual support to be able to exhibit together in venues of the Paris boulevards, thus transmitting a clear political message of intervention and appropriation of, and in, the urban spaces of the capital.

2. The road from Holland The idea of collective identity expressed by the social trend to form intellectual coteries was widespread: from the Club des Hachichins (uniting around 1850, at the hôtel Pimodan, Baudelaire, Gautier, Manet, Balzac), to the dinners of poets and writers (the Parnassians, the soirées de Meudon at Zola’s house, the dîners Magny held since 1862 at the

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homonymous restaurant), the associative phenomenon differed from the French tradition of the salon (revolving around one individual) and was a manifestation of Anglophilia and of the northward-looking avant-garde culture which Degas breathed in the 1850s and 1860s. In Degas’s circle, Fantin-Latour was the avant-garde painter who specifically engaged issues of democracy and fraternity in his group portraits of fellow artists. The Northern-ness of these group portraits materialises their character of liberal and partisan practice, meaning republicanism and opposition to the Emperor’s authoritarian rule, by referring to Anglomania and to the arthistorical precedent of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits. Giving clear indications concerning his symbolic geography, Degas himself said later in his life when referring to these years: “In our beginnings, Fantin, Whistler, and I, we were all on the same road, the road from Holland.”26 He initially appeared in Fantin-Latour’s Un Atelier aux Batignolles, examined below, but also painted some very Dutch group portraits with strong autobiographical connections, Portraits in an Office, New Orleans (Fig. 6-1) or The Orchestra of the Opera (Fig. 7-1), a group portrait of musicians each playing his instrument.

Fig. 6-1 Portraits in an Office, New Orleans, 1873, oil on canvas, cm 73 x 92, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau.

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Fig. 6-2 Henri Fantin-Latour, Un Atelier aux Batignolles, 1870, oil on canvas, cm 171 x 205, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

In Portraits in an Office, New Orleans, executed in 1872-73, during his stay in New Orleans, Degas portrayed his maternal uncle, Michel Musson, and his associates (James Prestridge, William Bell, and Degas’s brothers, Achille and René) with their workers in the office of their firm, dealing in cotton, the De Gas Brothers New Orleans. Each of the figures constituting the group is engaged in a different occupation, looking in a different direction. They are immersed in a daringly cut space, a deep and long diagonal perspective in the Japoniste style. The many individuals who populate it are put together in the spirit of the seventeenth-century Dutch group portrait: together, but separate, that is. The bespectacled Michel Musson, in top hat and black suit, appears seated on the foreground, to the left, his fists clutched on a sample of cotton that he has taken from the parcel on the chair to his right. In the centre of the painting, Degas placed his brother René, reading the newspaper in a confident and nonchalant pose: his legs are stretched out, he is holding a cigarette between his lips. His other brother Achille appears full-length to the left, in top hat and black suit, his legs are crossed while he leans on a counter. Cutting the space along the diagonal is the long wooden table over the whole length of which white balls of cotton are spread. Two men dressed in black are sampling it, while James Prestridge, in a light-brown coat and seated on a wooden stool looks on and engages in talk with William Bell, in profile. To the right, standing above a basket full of scraps of correspondence paper, the accountant of the firm, John Livaudais, in a bright white shirt

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and black waistcoat, leans on his open books. The business had only a modest success and soon declined causing financial trouble for the Degas family. Nevertheless, in his letters to his friends in Paris, Degas boasted of the abilities and vitality of his siblings’ business, and with this painting he was doing his best to ensure on behalf of his family their capitalist reputation as prosperous and active American businessmen. During the execution of the work, Degas wrote a letter to his friend Tissot, who was living in London after the Paris Commune, and whom Degas, in an act of self-fashioning, was trying to impress. Degas declared that his “vigorous painting” was destined for the English art dealer Agnew, who should place it in Manchester: for if a spinner ever wished to find his painter he really ought to hit on me. In it there are about fifteen individuals more or less occupied with a table covered with the precious material and two men, one half leaning and the other half sitting on it, the buyer and the broker, are discussing a pattern. A raw picture if there ever was one, and I think, from a better hand than many another.27

When it was exhibited at the second Impressionist exhibition, it was perceived as a painting of “accurate and frankly modern” realism, and the critic Louis Enault wrote: “It lacks warmth. It is bourgeois; but it is seen in a way that is accurate and correct, and furthermore it is properly drawn.”28 In considering this portrait, I would like to draw attention to portraiture as the genre bearing significance for “the larger question of how human beings understand their world in human terms” and for the fact that portraits are “pictures particularly indicative not only of an individual, but also of kinship and social status,” as Soussloff has written in The Subject in Art. Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern (2006). The sociality of the genre and the value of portraiture as “a genre for sociality” which “relies historically on upholding the idea of the singular individual in relation to others for whom recognition is essential”29 is all the more evident in nineteenth-century group portraits such as those by Fantin-Latour and, to offer another term of comparison within Degas’s social circles, Tissot’s group portrait of the Cercle de la rue Royale (1868). These group portraits illuminate the centrality of the modern collective idea in the Parisian intellectual debate to which Degas participated. Tissot’s Cercle de la rue Royale and Fantin-Latour’s group portraits both make the point that societies bind individuals who share interests. Tissot portrays the members of the well-known and official circle of bankers and aristocrats as elegant and relaxed while meeting at their club in the rue Royale, in the building overlooking the place de la Concorde. Fantin-Latour’s Un Atelier aux Batignolles (1870, Fig. 6-2) shows Manet at the easel, brush in hand,

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while Scholderer, Renoir, Zola, Maître, Bazille and Monet stand around him, each in a different pose and looking in a different direction, signifying their individuality. In his reference to Dutch art, Fantin was adopting on behalf of his group of friends the genre which a few years later Alois Riegl in his study of Dutch group portraiture (1902) would take to be the most indicative of an increasingly democratic and free society, a society, the Dutch one, that had freed itself from the tyrannies of absolute power and Catholicism, and whose citizens had chosen to interact democratically as free individuals within a social group.30 The society of the free Dutch cities epitomised modernity to the modern French artists of republican faith who, in the growing opposition to the Second Empire, were witnessing the crumbling of centuries-old institutions of absolute power, such as the Paris Salon. In the seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits, mostly of corporate organisations (charities or military guilds, as in Rembrandt’s so-called Night Watch, for instance), the sitters are together, but each individual acts distinctively and looks in a different direction. As Harry Berger jr has written in Manhood, Marriage, Mischief (2007), this phenomenon, in group portraiture, of posing together isolated figures, in a perfect balance between sociability and individuality, aims “to pretend to overcome, but actually to feature, the separateness of the individual participants who vie for the observer’s attention,” a device adopted by Degas in his Dutch-style works, as we have seen, to convey meanings of modernity and liberalism. For Berger jr, painters depict sitters posing both with each other and against each other, sitters who vie with each other in their efforts to strike attitudes of social attentiveness: sitters, in short, whose pretense of collective posing is itself conspicuously competitive.” The “tension between competitive and collective posing” expressed the attempt by institutions, such as the charities, “to cope with two closely inter-related effects of a thriving economy on its chief beneficiaries: an embarrassment of riches and (to put it bluntly) an embarrassment of beggars.”31 Fantin-Latour and his friends would have recognised how pertinent these issues were to their own professional existence as painters trying to make a living in the Paris of the age of capital.32 The questions of the modern artist’s condition, of his individuality and freedom, and of his professional role in a society deprived of State patronage underlie these modern group portraits. This study will also read Degas’s typical subject matter from the 1870s onwards (dancers, horses, women at work) as metaphors for the figure of the modern artist. Degas would then adopt a different and equally Northern pictorial language and themes, those of the French eighteenth-

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century, reflecting the nationalistic and chauvinistic atmosphere of ThirdRepublic culture. In the 1860s and early 1870s, the allegiance to the Northern tradition of Dutch painting was stronger, because the issue at stake was not the recovery of French greatness through its prerevolutionary artistic tradition, as it will be for many artists living under the Third Republic, but the expression of republican and liberal ideas in opposition to Napoleon III. Degas’s struggle for the assertion of his artistic individuality followed different strategies. Fantin-Latour’s Un Atelier aux Batignolles shows a coterie of engaged bourgeois intellectuals, gathered around Manet at the easel, with Zacharie Astruc sitting in an armchair next to him: the two signify the intellectual and the practical arms of the bourgeois revolution in painting. Around Manet and Astruc were a few of the avant-garde artists, writers, and musicians, who were seen at the café Guerbois in the place Clichy in the 1860s and early 1870s. Degas was of this group, too. In fact, in Fantin-Latour’s studies for his “adulatory company portrait,” as Harry Rand has happily defined Un Atelier aux Batignolles, Degas’s portrait appeared at the far left of the image, evidence of Degas’s being “on the road from Holland” with the others, as he said. In the final work Degas was replaced by a still-life, “a cluster of objects: a Japanese tray, a contemporary polychrome ceramic work by Bouvier (which in turn draws its inspiration from a Japanese source), and a statue of Athena.” Rand does not think that these objects stand for, or signify Degas; for him, they were testimony to the general eclectic concerns of these artists: classical sources as much as Japanese aesthetic.33 No one has explained why Degas’s portrait was not retained in the final work by Fantin-Latour and the disappearance of Degas from the place where he should be, with his fellows of the Guerbois gathered around Manet in the studio is intriguing. Degas perhaps requested that he be wiped out, not as an act of dissociation from the circle of the café Guerbois,34 but as an act of self-fashioning, a way of symbolically singling himself out of that circle by means of absence. One sees immediately that Fantin-Latour himself is missing from this group portrait. By leaving himself out of the group and subtracting Degas, Fantin-Latour was in a sense collaborating with Degas, but also, and more likely, alluding to a deeper closeness of intention between them. As Degas said, Fantin-Latour, Whistler, and he were on the road from Holland; but Renoir and Monet were not, for instance. Also, the omission points to the distinctiveness of their individual identities above the collective identity, furthering, without compromise, what Richard Brilliant termed “the additional importance” taken on by “this type of voluntary association.” This additional importance was conferred by the fact that in

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the nineteenth century “ ‘to be an artist’ carried with it a belief in the assumption of a special vocation with an attendant behaviour pattern, which effected at least the partial separation of artists, as a self-defining elite, from the rest of society.”35 In Un Atelier aux Batignolles, then, the absence of Degas raises the question of his whereabouts and generates a discourse pointing to his own distinctive (self-)portraiture undertaking. Fantin-Latour’s portraiture differs from Degas’s portraiture. If we could ask: where is Fantin?, we would know that he is painting this portrait. But where is Degas? As Brilliant has written, Fantin-Latour’s group portraits of painters and poets, assert, as the basis of association, a broadly intellectual “coherency of manners and activities, such as ‘poets,’ ‘philosophers,’ ‘mathematicians,’ and ‘artists’ ” as in “the locus classicus for such an assembly of cultural and intellectual giants,” Raphael’s School of Athens in the Vatican, that is. In such group portraits as Portraits in an Office, New Orleans, The Orchestra of the Opera (Fig. 7-1), and in a few of his early dance classrooms, Degas exploited the Dutch model of the image of peers (businessmen, musicians, dancers), with a more marked autobiographical intent, but no less modern or less Northern for that. With his self-portraits and portraits of friends, especially artists and musicians, socialites, soldiers, and engineers, Degas was painting his own iconography in almost pedantic emulation of a Northern painter of the Golden Age, the Flemish Anthony Van Dyck, to whom he had been referring in letters and works at least since his years in Italy. Before moving on to discuss Degas’s iconographic and autobiographic enterprise, however, FantinLatour’s Atelier aux Batignolles deserves its own analysis because it is relevant to our understanding of Degas’s Northern-ness and symbolic spaces. In true Dutch style, Un Atelier aux Batignolles confuses and mixes the genres of portraiture and peinture de genre accomplishing the sociopolitical transgression of fields and structures that Berger jr has located so well in his study of Rembrandt’s Night Watch and other Dutch group portraits of the seventeenth century.36 The artists associating in the wake of Manet in Un Atelier aux Batignolles were stating their understanding and appropriation of this transgression to be found in Dutch painting. Un Atelier aux Batignolles is therefore a declaration of avant-gardism, and a transgression of fields itself, where the space invoked is as much real as it is symbolic insofar as the meeting is taking place in a small space, Manet’s studio in the rue Guyot, that Fantin re-imagines as adequate to accommodate so many friends. As Duret wrote, The gathering existed only on canvas-it was a simply pictorial device by means of which he [Fantin-Latour] was able to bring them all together. It is true that Manet had his studio in the Batignolles, but it was never a place of

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The house, continued Duret, “was surrounded by depots of all kinds, with courtyards and large empty spaces.” Manet’s studio in the rue Guyot consisted of a large dilapidated-looking room. There was scarcely anything to be seen in it but pictures, framed and unframed, ranged in piles round the walls. As Manet had as yet sold only one or two canvases, all the work that he had done was accumulated here. He kept very much to himself; only his intimate friends used to visit him.37

These friends never posed together: they couldn’t, as there was no room, and Fantin-Latour had to work, again, the way the Dutch did, both nae t’ leven or uyt de gheest. Degas would adopt both the transgression of genres and structures and the distinctive theatricality of Dutch realism.38 With Degas’s racetrack and beach scenes and Opera pictures we see that Degas is no classicist or conservative bourgeois at all, as what is at work in his art is just this true Dutch style of the transgression of fields, places, spaces, and structures which makes his Northern-ness and modernity. In Degas’s oeuvre we find two remarkable examples of genre painting executed in the late 1860s. The first one is known as Interior or The Rape.39 In this we see a wallpapered bedroom, in the background of which we distinguish the fireplace on the left, framed images on the walls, and a bed on the righthand side, with a carpet at its foot. At the centre of the room is a round table with a lampshade, and a sewing box open to reveal its red interior and a piece of white cloth. Clothes are scattered on the floor and on the bed, while a man leans against the door on the right-hand side and a young woman on the left-hand side is sitting in profile and with her back turned on him. With its deep perspective, the dark and dramatic light created by the lampshade and by the man’s attitude and the blood on the bed, this painting has a claustrophobic atmosphere. Reff has provided a literary source for it, but scholars more recently agree that this was just Degas’s “tableau de genre,” as he called it himself.40 As Felix Krämer has recently discovered, Degas borrowed the motifs of the woman seated with her back turned towards the man and that of the bearded man standing against the door from an 1841 lithograph by Paul Gavarni in the Lorettes series. Also, for Krämer, Degas’s genre painting depicts not a domestic setting, as most scholars believe, but a scene of prostitution in a hotel room, the aftermath of a sexual assault.41 The second genre painting by Degas is Sulking, also known as The Banker, because it depicts either a small bank or other kind of office. A horseracing print hangs in the background, while a man sits at the table in the foreground, covered with papers and a woman leans on a

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chair, on the left-hand side. As the woman turns to look at the viewer and the man’s face is distorted by a grimace (which explains the painting’s title), viewers realise that they have interrupted nothing, just a scene of bourgeois life.42

3. The rue Laffitte A remarkable example of the effect of Degas’s avant-gardism and spatial practices in his conquest of the city is given by the exhibition of his works in the art galleries on the Paris boulevards, where, in the proximity of the Opera, the Bourse, and the Hôtel Drouot, the modern art world was concentrated until the first decade of the twentieth century, with the colour merchants and the art dealers of the rue Laffitte. After years of unpaid voluntary work, things began to change for Degas in 1871-72, as his paintings were bought and exhibited at Durand-Ruel’s gallery on the rue Laffitte, the world centre of modern art dealing. In September 1871, Musicians in the Orchestra (Fig. 7-2) was exhibited at Durand Ruel’s. In January 1872, the art dealer bought Degas’s first scene of dancers exercising, the small panel Dance Class of 1871 (Fig. 7-5), and The Ballet of Robert le Diable (Fig. 7-4). In June 1873, finally, Durand-Ruel bought Musicians in the Orchestra and in March 1874 he sold it to the tenor JeanBaptiste Faure. With Durand-Ruel putting his work forward in the window of his shop with two entrances, one at 16 rue Laffitte and one at 11 rue Le Peletier, Degas had managed, through his spatial practice of circumventing the official Salon system by executing voluntary and unpaid work, to enter the artistic geography of the city as a champion of the avant-garde. It was the victory of his practice of everyday life, as Michel de Certeau has defined it, of the strategy that Degas had devised of painting uncommissioned works in order to gain recognition as an artist in Paris. As Malcolm Miles has argued, the one factor, besides secessionism, that unites diverse concepts of modernity, or avant-gardes, is that they were all conceived in metropolitan cities (Paris, Berlin, Munich), as nowhere else one would find the mass of artists, intellectuals, collectors, and publics necessary to make new milieus and markets, new technologies of movement and energy, the gatherings in cafés, apartments, and the appearance of strangers to interrupt self-perception.43 As Degas proclaimed in a letter to Tissot, with his canvas displayed in Durand-Ruel’s shop-window, he had finally conquered a space of presence and representation, a much soughtafter position, despite his exposure to the scorn of some people. On 30 September 1871, Degas wrote to Tissot, who had fled France at the end of

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the Commune and settled in London, to keep him up to date with Parisian affairs: Stevens never stops telling us that he is doing masterpieces and that this year he will easily exceed one hundred thousand francs. I have seen something new of Manet’s, of medium size, well finished, done lovingly, in a word a change. What talent the fellow has.

Degas had good news also for himself: “I exhibited my Orchestre de l’Opéra in the rue Laffitte. The crowd…no, I shall say nothing: that would be Courbet.” Degas meant that if one were to appropriately describe the lowness, ignorant comments, and lack of understanding of the crowd looking at his work, one would need Courbet, an artist greatly gifted in the depiction of rustics. Degas had entered what Nicholas Green defined as “circuits of cultural production and consumption.” As Green wrote, “Sites like dealer windows, with their subtle orchestration of visual effects, together with the forms of social exchange they facilitate are active in defining and fixing the meanings and functions of the objects on display.” Right-Bank Parisian-ness is a culture historically characterised by the “emphasis on visual display” and by a “regime of luxury consumption” of which the art object is part and which had been active at least since the 1820s “in the formation of a self-consciously metropolitan culture.” Paris was “a modern city long predating Haussmannisation, in which the new quarters were linked spatially and culturally as well as economically with finance capital and with the structures of entertainment and consumption-from theatres and cafés to promenading and shopping.”44 Degas wanted to paint this Parisian culture to which he belonged and in his letter to Tissot one senses his feelings of conquest as well as his awareness that as an avantgarde artist he could not please the taste of the conventional public. Degas was aware that his position was avant-garde. As Miles has written, in its original military sense, an avant-garde is a small force ahead of an army, denoting in art a small group of artists ahead of the mass of society, artists who foresee society’s future developments and, instrumentally, lead society towards it. The avant-garde occupies a location “inside and outside the wider society”: Degas was finally on the boulevard, but he was also exposed to the scorn and hostility of that environment. This is a second aspect to the avant-garde, also transposed from military origin of the term: the factor of risk implicit in the solitary advance of the avant-garde, when a risk is taken in leading the way in order to gain a special knowledge.45 With his occupation of the Right Bank, Degas was encountering, certainly, the hostility of the coarse boulevard crowd to the novelties of avant-garde

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painting, but through his spatial practice he had made it to what was the heart of the Parisian art business. It was not so much commercial success, but a victory over officialdom, a taking of the city. In the rue Laffitte were concentrated both the art trade and the banking business. Durand-Ruel’s shop had previously been a bank. The street was known as the “rue des tableaux,” given the number of art dealers who were established there: Durand-Ruel, Beugniet, Weyl, Cachardy, Détrimont, Tempelaere, were among them and others would come soon, such as Bernheim-Jeune, Clovis Sagot, Georges Bernheim, and Ambroise Vollard.46 Nearby stood the Hôtel Drouot, the auction house that since its opening in 1853 had seen the dispersal of many collections of art ancient and modern, including some fabulous ones, such as that of the Duc de Morny, of Khalil Bey, Alphonse Oudry, Charles Edwards. Later in the 1870s, there would be the dispersal of Courbet’s collection and in March 1875 a sale of Impressionist works, organised by the artists themselves and attended by their friends. There was nothing glamorous about the latter sale, and as Gustave Geffroy put it: “Il ne s’agissait pas seulement d’exposer, il s’agissait de vendre, pour vivre. ”47 The most active and sophisticated collectors resided nearby. Art studios, colour merchants, theatres, fashion houses, department stores and cafés were all around, besides institutions such as the Banque de France and the Opera, constituting a territory within the Right Bank whose vocation (the conflation of art and luxury) made it a world apart from the rest of Paris and from the rest of the world. With the installation of his painting in Durand Ruel’s shop-window, Degas had effectively triumphed over a specific territory, that of Right-Bank Parisian-ness. Just as Left-Bank mentality was “a special sort of patriotism, when it was not ideology,” as Herbert Lottman put it in The Left Bank (1982), so Right-Bank mentality was a culture, a frame of mind, a set of moral values, which one could inherit or adopt. It was during Degas’s lifetime, and through such spatial stories of artistic success like his, that the Paris Right Bank and Left Bank became defined as two opposite physical and mental territories. This polarisation of the Parisian intellectual world lasted well into the twentieth century, spanning Parisian modernity in its entirety. The best description of these territories is in the following words by Lottman, concerning the Paris of the 1930s: There was a definite Left-Bank mentality: a special sort of patriotism, when it was not ideology. The Right Bank, it has been noted, claimed André Maurois, Sacha Guitry, Marcel Pagnol, Le Roi des Resquilleurs (a popular film of the early 1930s), Ginger Rogers, and Fred Astaire. LeftBank culture encompassed Jean Giraudoux, Luis Buñuel, Drôle de drame

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Chapter Six (the Marcel Carné-Jacques Prévert burlesque film), Gaston Baty, William Powell, and Myrna Loy. In a work with the expressive title Saint-Germaindes-Prés, mon village, Léo Larguier expressed scorn for the cafés of the Right Bank, “gigantic hotel lobbies, extravagant palaces, without a quiet corner, and where the people of our neighborhood could not survive.”

For the Left-Bank intellectuals of the years in between the two World Wars, the Right Bank was “the domain of the mindless middle classes and the life of the mind couldn’t cross the Seine.”48 Two generations earlier, the Right Bank, the domain that connotes Walter Benjamin’s concept of Baudelairian modernity as commodity culture, was the territory of the Impressionist avant-garde whose works embody Right-Bank mentality in themes and style. This leads us to consider how much Parisian urban geography is intrinsic to the history of avant-gardes. If rustic Montmartre would be both the “congenial home” of anarchist cabaret culture of the 1880s and Cubism,49 the Ecole de Paris would be Montparnasse, “at once cosmopolitan and a village,” while the Dadas and early Surrealists are associated with the passage de l’Opéra, where the café Certa became their headquarters “precisely because it was remote from Bohemia.”50 The last of the Parisian avant-gardes, Situationism, would be identified with the Left Bank.51 Degas, bourgeois and Parisian artist, identified with the world of the boulevards and sought full integration in it, just as art dealers had been aspiring to set up their shops there during the second half of the nineteenth century. The rue Laffitte was already the centre of the art trade in 1858, when Théophile Gautier had defined it as “a permanent Salon, an exhibition of painting that lasts the whole year round. Five or six shops show pictures in their windows. They are regularly changed and illuminated at night.”52 This modernity was well in place before Haussmann’s urban transformations of Paris and before the appearance of art dealing on a large scale with Durand-Ruel, who left his premises in the rue de la Paix to move to the rue Laffitte in 1869.53 The street was still the centre of the art trade when, in 1893, Vollard opened his art gallery at 39 rue Laffitte.54 Attractively installed in the boulevard which twenty years earlier Degas and the other avant-garde artists had strived to conquer, Vollard could proceed to one of the practical applications of such geographical positioning: his witness of the aged Degas proceeding to his habitual afternoon walk: “il descendait rue Laffitte, commençait sa tournée par Durand-Ruel, passait chez Bernheim Jeune et finissait par chez moi.”55 Within tis framework of mapping Degas’s real, invented, and symbolic spaces, Vollard’s recollections of Degas reviewing his world, so to say, by doing the rounds of the art galleries, looking into the shop-windows along

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the way to finish in Vollard’s shop, provide evidence of Degas’s world, the specific social and political texture of the ninth arrondissement of Paris.

4. The café The café was one of the places in Degas’s strategy for taking the city. Cafés are essential institutions of Parisian sociability and spaces of modernity, where citizens are free to move and participate in the social and political life of the city and where the permeability of the urban spaces that characterises Paris is palpable.56 As Alfred Delvau wrote in his Histoire anecdotique des cafés et cabarets de Paris (1862), “La vie de café est menée par tout le monde à Paris. Ecrire une histoire des cabarets et cafés de Paris, c’est écrire une histoire de toutes les classes de la société parisienne.”57 Degas, an avant-garde painter who lived and worked in the Paris of the boulevards, led the café life expected of every Parisian, frequenting regularly such cafés of the avant-garde as the Guerbois, and later the Nouvelle Athènes, and the Café de Châteaudun. These establishments, not mentioned in Delvau’s Histoire anecdotique, belonged to Degas’s bohemian and artistic geography, and a few of his paintings are set in such places of the avant-garde. Both the very small At the Café Châteaudun (National Gallery, London), showing two anonymous customers exchanging conversation over an open newspaper, and the more celebrated At The Café de la Nouvelle Athènes or L’Absinthe (Fig. 6-3) address the modern theme of Parisian sociability through the depiction of such café types as the amateurs, the stupefied customer, the Bohemian pipe-smoking artist in the Northern tradition of Van Ostade’s tavern scenes. The relevance of cafés as places of Parisian sociability is such that a few of them have come to be associated with the intellectual movements in arts and letters that originated or were developed within their spheres. The Andler-Keller, a Bavarian brasserie in the rue Hautefeuille frequented by students and wood engravers, was in the early 1850s “the temple of Realism, of which Mr Courbet was the supreme pontiff and Mr Champfleury the officiating cardinal,” as Delvau recalled in 1862. In the late 1850s, intellectual life moved from the Left Bank to the boulevards at the foot of Montmartre, where the Brasserie des Martyrs in the rue des Martyrs became the “grande hôtellerie de l’intelligence.” Nowhere else, in Paris, wrote Delvau, could one find a similar assembly of “représentants de l’art, de la poésie et de l’esprit.” On its two elegant and comfortably furnished floors (except for an excess of mirrors and gildings), one could

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find every day between five and midnight, writers and poets, journalists, musicians and artists of different leanings, “toutes les écoles parisiennesles réalistes et les fantaisistes, les ingristes et les coloristes.”58 Other artists’ cafés in the 1860s were the Rochefoucauld and the Nouvelle Athènes, where artists discussed their paintings, statues, and the demands of their job, not unlike the chiffonniers discussing their sordid occupation at the Café des Chiffonniers in the rue Neuve-Saint-Médard on the Left Bank, or writers discussing their articles at the Brasserie des Martyrs.59

Fig. 6-3 Le Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, 1875-76, oil on canvas, cm 92 x 68, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

But as Claude Monet told the art critic Gustave Geffroy, it was in the obscure Café Guerbois, at 11 Grande rue des Batignolles, that one met many realist artists living in the surrounding area in the late 1860s.60 The Guerbois, which is not mentioned in Delvau’s 1862 history of Parisian coffeehouses, was located in a discredited section of the ninth arrondissement, the Saint-Lazare district. According to the flâneur and writer Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, writing in 1861, this was no longer a zone for prostitutes, the lorettes of earlier decades, but the bad reputation had stuck to it. Proper women and families avoided settling in the surroundings, which were now inhabited by “des employés, des gens de lettres, des peintres, des rentiers” and in the houses one did not hear pianos or see children and dogs. The area was quiet and silent, almost sad, with no night life: On y rentre à neuf heures, on s’y couche à dix, à onze heures les rues sont aussi désertes, aussi tristes que celles du faubourg Saint-Germain. On n’y

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rencontre ni chanteurs, ni ivrognes, ni noctambules; tout y est calme, silencieux, sévère et d’un bout à l’autre de Bréda-street on peut entendre le galop des rats qui jouent dans le ruisseau, et les ébattements des chats amoureux.61

Also called the Batignolles, the area suited the artists’ hard-working routine of days spent mainly in the studio, before moving on to end the day in a café.62 Before becoming a patron at the Café Guerbois, Manet had been a regular at the Café de Bade, next to the gallery of the art dealer Louis Martinet, on the boulevard des Italiens, where around 1866 he could be found every evening, between 5.30 and 7 o’clock.63 There, Manet began to meet a group previously found on the Left Bank, at the Café Molière, near the Odéon. They had begun to stream across the city to the Right Bank. They were led by Fantin-Latour and had all been amongst the Refusés at the Salon of 1863: Legros, Astruc, Scholderer, Whistler, and Carolus-Duran. We know from a brief note of correspondence that around 1868, Manet and Degas also met at the Café Tortoni, an elegant café at the corner of the rue Taitbout and the boulevard des Italiens, a famous Parisian institution since the days of the Empire and the Restauration, not far from the Café Riche. Customers included the Goncourt brothers, Nadar, Gavarni, Offenbach, Délibes, About, and Dumas.64 The younger generation of artists would choose settings more in tune with their radical ideas for their gatherings. According to Duret, the Café Guerbois was chosen accidentally because it was close to the Manets’ apartment (first at 34 boulevard de Batignolles, then, from 1867, at 49 rue de StPetersbourg) and because Manet’s small studio on the rue Guyot was not a suitable place of rendez-vous. With Duret’s account, the Café Guerbois has entered the art-historical literature as one of the key places of modernism, the place from where Manet’s leadership and charisma spread. During these discussions, Duret wrote, Manet “gave the men who gathered round him the technique of painting in bright and luminous tones, and then, interchanging ideas, they proceeded to develop, each in his own way, but all together, the method of painting in the open air.”65 Despite what Duret wrote about Manet’s predominant role, there is evidence that Manet himself considered Zola as much a spokesperson for the avant-garde as he was.66 Bazille, Stevens, Antoine Guillemet, Renoir (still living on the Left Bank), Degas, more rarely Cézanne, Desboutin, Guys, and Carolus-Duran appeared at the Café Guerbois, joined by such writers as Mallarmé, Zola, Champfleury, Castagnary, and Philippe Burty. According to Georges Rivière, they were ironically referred to as the Académie des Batignolles. A drawing by Manet at the Fogg Art Museum gives us an idea of the Guerbois, where on Friday evenings two tables to

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the left of the entrance were reserved for this “cénacle un peu frondeur” which entertained a dissentient, revolutionary atmosphere, “où se dépensait autant d’esprit qu’au Café Procope au temps où Diderot y tenait ses assises.”67 In 1881 Caillebotte would accuse Degas of spending too much time holding forth at the Nouvelle Athènes,68 and it was at the Café Guerbois, in the late 1860s, as Manet wrote, that Degas manifested himself as a “grand aesthetician.” The two engaged in political discussions, the tone of which we guess from a regretful letter of Manet to Fantin-Latour from Boulogne-sur-mer, where he was spending the summer in 1868: It’s clear, my dear Fantin, that you Parisians have all the entertainment you could wish for but I have no one here to talk to; so I envy your being able to discuss with that famous aesthetician Degas the question of whether or not it is advisable to put art within reach of the lower classes, by turning out pictures for sixpence apiece. I haven’t been able to discuss painting with anyone from outside since I’ve been here-good old Duranty, who will turn into a billiards champion at the rate he’s going, is wrong about my grand projects, he imagines me painting pictures on a grand scaleabsolutely not, I’ve been complaining long enough at being in that situation; I am now concerned to earn some money and since I think, like you, that there’s not much to be done in our stupid country overrun by government bureaucrats, I want to try exhibiting in London next year.

As Manet indicated in the same letter to Fantin-Latour, their topics of discussion were the English art market and other possible ways of gaining visibility through group action, in order to alleviate the shortcomings of the French establishment: I think that if we resolved to stick together and above all not to get discouraged, we would be able to react against all this mediocrity which is only held together by consensus.69

The discussion about the opportunities offered by the English market was closely linked to the issue of the inadequacy of the official Paris Salon. In Degas’s case, for instance, his paintings had been exhibited there since 1865, and in 1870, at his last Salon, two of his portraits were accepted for show.70 But merely being exhibited was not the issue: the Salon as a space needed modernisation. Improvement was needed urgently in the hanging of the artworks. What artists wanted and what constituted certainly some of the urgent content of their café discussions is stated in the public complaints that some of them lodged in the press. Degas wrote an open letter to the Salon Jury that was published in the Paris Journal of 12 April 1870. Having in mind the Salon walls stacked with paintings arranged in

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alphabetical order, Degas clearly stated that the problem for the exhibiting Salon artist was the lack of a space of his or her own: “Something which any exhibitor has an unquestionable right to, and which has never been mentioned in written plans or secret meetings, is a place to his liking.” Degas even accompanied his claim with a series of museographical suggestions for the members of the Salon Jury, who, he advised, should entrust the hanging of the Salon with the festival organisers Belloir and Godillot! The Salon, with its walls uniformly covered by paintings of all genres and styles, embodied in the sphere of Art an essential aspect of French cultural and political identity: the monarchic universalism making one body with the nation. Individuality here was undecipherable and undesirable, but it was what the independent painters wanted. In order for the public to give the individual talent of the exhibiting artist the deserved amount of consideration, the artist needed space. In his struggle for such space, Degas suggested that the administration “have no more than two rows of pictures and to leave between them a space of at least twenty or thirty centimeters, without which they detract from each other.” The rooms once destined to drawings, Degas advised, should accommodate paintings, while the drawings could be ”taken out of their desert and mixed with the paintings” by setting them up on “large and small screens like the English had at the Exposition Universelle.” According to Degas, the English did everything better and with no fuss. For instance, they mounted paintings on screens, as he wrote: “Leighton, who enjoys in England at least as good a reputation as Cabanel does at home, had a painting displayed on a screen, and it did not look at all like a slight.” Among other “expected innovations,” Degas also argued for the exhibitor’s right to choose on which row to hang his or her work and to withdraw his work after a few days, if he or she desired.71 After 1870 Degas did not submit paintings to the Salon Jury. At least since 1867, as we know from Bazille’s correspondence, in the cafés of the avant-garde, the artists had been planning their takeover of the city, and their intention to appropriate and create their own spaces for the exhibition of their works.72 The modern, independent painters wanted to be considered for their individuality and to achieve that they had to create their own exhibition environment, one that satisfied the artwork’s creator as much as the interested exhibition visitor, for whom the created décor provided a rewarding social and psychological experience. The conquest of urban private spaces for their exhibitions, or installations, to use Martha Ward’s term, was the solution to the problems of the avant-garde painters, a solution to which Degas would lead them. According to Ward, in fact, Degas’s 1870 letter to the newspaper must be situated at the beginning of

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the history of Impressionist installations. As she writes, even though the reforms advocated by Degas actually conformed to the logic of recent Salon reforms, artists were far from obtaining the exhibition space they deemed appropriate, a space they would ultimately choose and create for themselves a few years later, in the boulevard des Capucines.73 In conclusion, it is clear that what the avant-garde artists were discussing, at the café or at their houses, in the course of their café meetings and musical soirées, was the staging of a new invasion of the city, aiming to take its private spaces in a re-enactment of Parkhurst Ferguson’s Paris-asrevolution. At the head of this avant-garde we will not find Manet, who continued to submit paintings to the Salon, but Degas.

5. Degas’s avant-garde With his role as a leading organiser of the independent exhibitions that took place in the Paris of the boulevards over the twelve years between 1874 and 1886, Degas’s modernity and avant-gardism clearly define themselves in his appropriation and reinvention of Parisian space within a project that combined artistic and ideological engagement. Unlike FantinLatour, who painted group portraits of artists and writers linked by affinities, and who belonged to various consociations (such as the Société des Trois, the Société du Jing-Lar and the Vilains Bonhommes), Degas always resisted joining directly artistic societies of the romantic type. Nevertheless, between 1874 and 1886, he was among the leading organisers of the independent group shows that stood for intransigeance and artistic resistance. To be more precise, Degas led the way by working to round up new members and exhibitors, to organise group meetings, and devoting himself to locating suitable venues, including jotting down in his notebooks plans for exhibitions in which each artist took responsibilities for the display of his or her works. The 1874 exhibition was taking place in a difficult moment of Degas’s life. His father Auguste had got ill, during a journey that was taking him to Naples, and there he would die on 23 February 1874, only a few weeks before the opening of the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris.74 In late March 1874, Degas wrote to Bracquemond to congratulate him for joining the society, to which Bracquemond had agreed through the intercession of a common friend, the critic Burty. In that letter, Degas also took the opportunity to comment on Fantin-Latour and Manet’s eccentric behaviour regarding the society’s group action: We are getting an excellent recruit in you. Be assured of the pleasure you give and the good you are doing us. (Manet, egged on by Fantin and crazy

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himself continues to refuse, but nothing seems definite yet from this side).75

Whistler totally ignored Degas’s invitation to show. Degas invited Bracquemond to submit works quickly, in order to be ready for their insertion in the catalogue. Degas invited him to go see the premises: “There is plenty of room (Boulevard des Capucines, former studio Nadar) and a unique position etc. etc. etc.”76 It is worth noting that Degas’s language, when addressing Bracquemond as a “recruit,” denoted the engagement of combat, with its field planning, and its group activity. Degas also wrote to Berthe Morisot advising her to send her pictures and personally supervise their hanging.77 One of Degas’s letters to Tissot, written just prior to the exhibition of 1874, is worth quoting extensively. In the letter, Degas begged Tissot, who had been living in London since after the Commune, to join the Society’s exhibition and its combative spirit, and to do so patriotically, in the name of France: Look here, my dear Tissot, no hesitations, no escape. You positively must exhibit at the Boulevard. It will do you good, you (for it is a means of showing yourself in Paris from which people said you were running away) and us too. Manet seems determined to keep aloof, he may well regret it. Yesterday I saw the arrangement of the premises, the hangings and the effect in daylight. It is as good as anywhere. And now Henner (elected to the second rank of the jury) wants to exhibit with us. I am getting really worked up and am running the thing with energy and, I think, a certain success. The newspapers are beginning to allow more than just the bare advertisement and though not yet daring to devote a whole column to it, seem anxious to be a little more expansive. The realist movement no longer needs to fight with the others, it already is, it exists, it must show itself as something distinct, there must be a salon of realists. Manet does not understand that. I definitely think he is more vain than intelligent. So exhibit anything you like. (…) So forget the money side for a moment. Exhibit. Be of your country and with your friends. The affair, I promise you, is progressing better and has a bigger reception than I ever thought possible.

At the end of his letter, Degas asked Tissot to try to convince Legros, also living in London, to join in, and closed with the following words: “The general feeling is that it is a good, fair thing, done simply, almost boldly.”78 There was a strong avant-garde feeling in the group and Degas struggled to keep it alive and spread it around. Degas is often described as stale bourgeois, shy, and reserved, in opposition to Manet, the glamorous father of modernity, whose self-

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assurance and nonchalance, according to a few writers, Degas envied.79 But while Manet fought only for his own painting and reputation, Degas was in fact defending a core idea of avant-garde practice: the collective action, and he was engaged in the avant-garde project par excellence, the construction of an environment.80 This social and socialist side of Degas is never emphasised in the literature, which rests on such commonplaces as the meanness of Degas.81 Years later, however, Pissarro acknowledged it in a letter to his son Lucien, when he wrote that that “after all, Degas is very fine and sympathetic to people who are in trouble.”82 The fact that in 1874, while Manet renounced the public role of father of the realist avantgarde, Degas decided to pursue it, must also be linked in part to Degas’s vastly overlooked bohemianism, and to his financial necessity to fight tooth and nail in the public arena, at the moment of his father’s sudden death, and at the moment of financial difficulties experienced by his art dealer Durand-Ruel.83 A few years after the first Impressionist exhibition, and before Manet’s death in 1883, Degas explicitly manifested his disappointment with Manet’s individualistic stance.84 But to return to the issue of the creation of avant-garde spaces, the main point of the exhibition initiative was that in the independent group shows of 18741886, each artist member aimed to create a space where the works of each of them, on show side by side, could be contrasted and compared. These private spaces have been aptly defined by Ward as studied installations: this term conveys their artistic modernity as Wagnerian total works of art, as artificial re-creations of the intimate conditions of a bourgeois interior, of a small Salon, or those of an artist’s studio. It was a retreat into interiority, but within a setting, that of the Paris boulevards, which in turn was artificial and theatrical in its embodiment and display of visual culture. In the apartment or studio-like spaces recreated by avant-garde artists on the boulevard, one could both propitiate a deeper understanding of each artist, such as could be achieved by serious connoisseurs and collectors only in their own dwellings, or in the course of visits to the artist’s studio, and, as Ward noted, “cultivate conditions appropriate to the appreciation of small easel paintings.” Degas exhibited ten works.85 In what follows I will consider the different aspects related to the Impressionist installations as invented interior-like exhibition venues: their being alternative spaces of artistic individuality, their chosen locations on the Paris boulevards, and their being environments in which the artists sought to achieve an effect of total harmony by extending their attention to such details of the décor as frames and varnish. The first exhibition of the Société Anonyme de Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, opened on 15 April 1874 at 35 boulevard des Capucines, in the

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former atelier of the photographer Nadar. Degas had proposed that the group be called La Capucine, with a nasturtium as an emblem, in order to recall concretely the location where the exhibition was to take place, the boulevard des Capucines, but also the social and political territory of their statement. The other founding members of the Société Anonyme did not follow his proposal. The exhibition, programmed to last four weeks, was open until 8 pm every day and could be visited for an entrance fee of one franc. Edmond Renoir, Auguste’s brother, had prepared the catalogue, which listed the thirty participating artists in alphabetical order, and the works in progressive numbers. Degas had taken care of the recruitment of the exhibitors, ensuring that even more conservative artists be admitted to join and exhibit.86 The 165 works on display had been hung in two rows, with the largest works at the upper level. From the boulevard des Capucines, a large staircase led to the exhibition premises, which consisted of a series of large rooms, “which received the light sidewise, as in an apartment” as John Rewald wrote.87 The walls of the venue were as Nadar had left them, covered with brown linen, which, as Ward has argued, “marked a departure from the red of the official walls of the Salon and Universal Exhibitions.”88 Draperies were hung, as we know from the critic Burty, who also noted that the venue had the appearance of a private gallery or apartment. In a later review he wrote that the artists’ intention had been “to present their paintings almost under the same conditions as in a studio, that is in good light, isolated from one another, in smaller numbers than in official exhibitions, which are like docks of painting and sculpture, without the neighbourhood of other works either too bright or too dull.”89 For their second exhibition, in the spring of 1876, the Impressionists chose to exhibit at the three rooms that constituted DurandRuel’s gallery in the rue Le Peletier.90 The critic Albert Wolff in his review for the Figaro of the 3 April interpreted the event as follows: La rue Le Peletier a du malheur. Après l’incendie de l’Opéra, voici un nouveau désastre qui s’abat sur le quartier. On vient d’ouvrir chez DurandRuel une exposition qu’on dit être de peinture. Le passant inoffensif, attiré par les drapeaux qui décorent la façade, entre, et à ses yeux épouvantés s’offre un spectacle cruel : cinq ou six aliénés, dont une femme, un groupe de malheureux atteints de la folie de l’ambition, s’y sont donné rendezvous pour exposer leurs œuvres.91

In 1877 the Independents rented an empty apartment of five rooms at the first floor of the 6 rue Le Peletier, across the street from Durand-Ruel. Some rooms overlooked the boulevard des Italiens. Georges Rivière described the space as follows:

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Artworks of Monet, Caillebotte, and Renoir were hung in the first room. In the second room were artworks by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cordey, Guillaumin and Franc-Lamy. The third room had almost only paintings by Cézanne and Berthe Morisot, one canvas by Renoir, and one by Pissarro; a smaller section had artworks by Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, and Caillebotte. Degas’s artworks occupied the last gallery, a small room at the back, with a few drawings and water-colours by Morisot. At the 1877 exhibition, Pissarro introduced the use of white frames, an example soon followed by the others.93 Pissarro presented his works in flat, white frames that did not project shadows on the painted surface, and so enhanced the colours of the artworks. This kind of frame integrated with the canvas, constituting with it a single object, which in the artists’ intention should harmonise with the exhibition room itself to create an installation, that is, a unified, total work of art. Later, coloured frames would be introduced and, in the late 1880s, gilded frames, which had never been rejected totally, returned to favour even among the Impressionists.94 But in 1877, the choice of such frames was ideological and bourgeois: as Isabelle Cahn has explained, the new painting rejected the golden frame and its “valeurs triomphales” in favour of flat and coloured frames constituting a “prolongement plastique de leurs oeuvres.”95 Frame making presented different aspects of interests to the painters who were re-creating interiors as exhibition venues: the decorative value of frames related them to furniture, and complemented the decoration of the rooms; it also was an applied art in itself.96 During the Ancien Régime, the fabrication of frames was the work of painters, sculptors and cabinet makers. In nineteenth-century Paris, according to Cahn, the art of picture framing grew remarkably. Artists like Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, and Degas began in the late 1870-80s to design their own frames and to collaborate with picture framers in the creation of original frames, as the English painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had done in the 1850-60s. Whistler, who in the 1870s painted both canvas and frame to signal their unity, claimed to have introduced this idea to the French painters of the avant-garde, although they said that they were cultivating the same practice about the same time.97 Manet always favoured golden frames, as did art dealers such as Durand-Ruel and Georges Petit, who wanted to recreate in their galleries the Salon-look, and impose this on the artists showing there. In the 1870s, Degas was

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designing his own frames (sketches of which are in his notebooks) and collaborating with picture framers such as Cluzel to create them.98 We know from Louisine Havemeyer and Vollard that Degas was very concerned about the frames of his works. He considered them integral to the painting, and feared that the frames would be changed once the artworks left his studio.99 Between 1879 and 1881 the Independents’ shows were all held in apartments. The fourth exhibition of the sixteen Indépendants, as they called themselves that year, was open in April-May at 28 avenue de l’Opéra, where, as Ed Lilley has written, they were “absolutely at the heart of the fashionable city.” Installed on the recently opened avenue de l’Opéra, the street that led to Garnier’s neo-baroque Opera house, “modern painting was at the heart of modern life.”100 Degas, who had made plans of the apartment, and designed the exhibition poster in his notebook,101 exhibited works that were totally in accord with such places of modernity: he was showing seven dance and theatre subjects, besides his eight portraits, one race course scene, a café-concert scene and one laundress picture. The fifth exhibition of the Independents took place at 10 rue des Pyramides, in April 1880. That year Gauguin joined the Independents. Soon after the opening of the exhibition, Edmond Duranty died and Degas decided to include his portrait of the critic in the exhibition. The sixth exhibition was held in April 1881 at 35 boulevard des Capucines. It was a first-floor apartment at the rear of an unfinished building. It was a suite of five small rooms connected by corridors. They were furnished with Algerian settees and rocking chairs, but the ceilings were so low and the rooms so poorly lit that gaslight was necessary during the day, and observers could not comfortably view the works, as the critic Havard wrote.102 Jules Clarétie, in reviewing the show, used an appropriate military metaphor to define the Independents: that of a “petit bataillon d’éclaireurs faisant sonner haut leur trompettes,” and who had to “lodge themselves as they could.” As he wrote, “ils font clapoter en plein boulevard leurs faisceaux de drapeaux tricolores, et ils ont tendu de moquette l’escalier qui mène à l’appartement, un peu bas de cerveau (comme disent les bourgeois), où ils ont accroché leurs pétards. Un feu d’artifice en chambre.” The low ceilings, which forced viewers to stoop, were a way of forcing the critics “to go on their knees in front of the artworks.” For Clarétie, the most original feature of the “révolutionnaires” consisted in the white frames, the gilded frames having been abandoned to the “vieux peintres de la vieille école, aux barbouilleurs au jus de chique ennemis des peintures claires. ” For Clarétie, “ Il faut bien faire trou dans la muraille dans la pénombre de nos appartements modernes, et quand on

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ne peut crever le mur avec la lumière de son tableau, on le perce avec le blanc de son cadre. ”103 At this show, Degas’s artworks were grouped in a small cabinet at the end of the suite of the five-room apartment. Degas decorated his room in yellow, and introduced another innovation, that of including artworks in different media, and whose matt-ness, as Marthe Ward has written, “given the setting of the exhibition and the scale of the works,” suggested “a rococo-like confection and a delicacy of effect far removed from the glaring “public” surfaces of Salon oils.”104 Besides the personalised frames, other devices were introduced by Degas, Pissarro, Cassatt, and others in their interior-like venues to signify an original and emancipated space of a nature contrary to the Salon space. The search for matt-ness (through such techniques as gouache, pastel, distemper, or peinture à l’essence, and such materials as absorbent canvas priming, or un-primed coloured paper) and the use of glass plates over the artworks, instead of varnish, were also “oppositional practices,” as Anthea Callen has termed them. In her article of 1994, Callen has examined what she has aptly called the “politics of varnishing” in 1870-1907. The practice of varnishing or not varnishing finished artworks was an aesthetic choice and a carrier of ideological messages. Instead of the academic practice of varnishing artworks to confer on them a glossy and artificial aspect, building relief through the opposition of light and shade, avant-garde painters adopted the “strong light, brilliant, opaque colour and matt finishes” which were cultural metaphors for originality, modernity and above all, for Callen, for a primitivism which was associated with early Italian art. This primitivism, Callen has written, can be explicitly linked to urban modernity while being “a reaction to the city” and “to civilisation’s decadent over-sophistication and inauthenticity.”105 At the eighth and last exhibition of the Indépendants, in May-June 1886, Degas exhibited fifteen artworks, all pastels.106 Besides their interest for my discussion of the spaces of the Independent exhibitions as recreated interiors, the issues of primitivism and experimentalism have also other aspects of interest to my general argument for a revision of the image of Degas as a classicist and a conservative. On the one hand, the issue of Degas’s interest in primitivism, which includes early Italian art as much as Ingres’s art, allows us to place Degas’s cult for Ingres in the 1880s and later years, rather than in the painter’s youth. On the other hand, Degas’s experimentalism of the 1880s (summed up by his own words: “Heureusement que moi, je n’ai pas trouvé ma manière; ce que je m’embêterais”) should not be read as merely anti-academic practice: in Degas’s experimentalism, his faith in the craft did not exclude the borrowing of academic practices. For instance, Degas did not like to use

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the fixatives normally available, preferring for his pastels a fixative made according to a “secret” formula by his Italian friend Luigi Chialiva.107 But, as we know, Degas also embraced an academic practice such as the ‘calque superposé’ (tracing) as soon as he was introduced to it by Chialiva’s son, Jules, when this last learnt it on his first day as a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.108 According to Ward the Impressionist shows “went further than any other ventures of the Impressionist group in subordinating the autonomy of the work and the individuality of the artist to the harmonies of a private environment.” But they were nonetheless, in the scholar’s opinion, “tentative,” “awkward and strange assemblages,” pervaded as they were by internal tensions due to the reluctance, on the part of a few of the artists, to define their paintings “in the terms of the decorative and nondiscursive modes of the domestic interior.” For Ward, the exhibitors, in the “odd assortment of forms and subjects that showed up in the colored frames, tinted walls, and close spaces” of their Impressionist expositions, were ultimately unable “to accept the possibility that their own installations evinced: art might be subordinated to or subsumed by an emerging (feminine) sense of interior decoration.” For Ward, it was in the literary field that “the most striking and notorious development of the gendered and classed implications of the decorative enterprises occurred,” and specifically in Edmond de Goncourt’s La Maison d’un Artiste and Huysmans’s A Rebours. In these texts, the “primary divisions of responsibility for the appearances of the bourgeois interior, the roles of the man as collector and the woman as decorator, were collapsed as men of leisure inhabited womanless spaces.”109 Nevertheless, I would insist that Degas and the other painters were successful in taking the city, insofar as the challenge of the Impressionist installations was one of defining and asserting their identity as oppositional and independent artists through the conquest of spaces in the city. As I hope to have shown in this chapter, through mapping Degas, that is through my pin-pointing his avant-garde practice as carried out in such spaces of the city as the Louvre, the cafés, art galleries, and private exhibition venues on the Paris boulevards, Degas was as much an artist of action and as modern and progressive as Manet was.

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Notes 1

See Delteil 1919 and Delteil 1968, Moreau-Nélaton, 1926, vol. I, p. 36, and Moreau-Nélaton, 1931. For Manet’s fondness of the Infanta see the artist’s letter to Fantin-Latour in Cailler, 1945, pp. 42-4. 2 See Wilson-Bareau, 1991, p. 47. 3 See for example Benedict Nicolson’s definition of Degas as a “reactionary of genius”: Nicolson, 1946 or Roy McMullen’s description of Degas as “a banker’s son” and “man-about-town he would be throughout his life,” “an opera enthusiast, a first-nighter at the theatre,” and “a little angel of proper social adjustment and cultural conformism”: McMullen, 1984, p. 41 and p. 47 and pp. 36-40 for the topic of the influence of Ingres on the young Degas. 4 See for instance Jeffrey Myers, who has recently written in a study of the friendship between Manet and Degas: “The two young painters soon discovered they were kindred spirits. Both were Paris-born and educated, well-off, cultured and sophisticated.” and that “Manet inspired Degas to abandon his early historical paintings and paint scenes of contemporary life. Like Manet, Degas painted figures in the studio rather than outdoors.” : Meyers, 2005. 5 For McMullen, Degas and Manet were both studio painters and “They were also united by their upper-class backgrounds, their respect for the old masters, their indulgence in irony, their delight in the passing Second Empire show, and their love of flânerie.” Moreover, they admired each other’s work but Degas was envious of Manet’s “natural charisma” while Manet was irritated by Degas’s “brilliant artificiality”: McMullen, 1984, p. 156. 6 See Crisci-Richardson, 2011. 7 Spanning the decades of modernity, between 1830 and 1930, bohemianism revealed itself explicitly after 1848, the year of revolution, and with the publication of such writings as Henry Murger’s Scène de la vie de Bohème (1851): Seigel, 1986, pp. 3-30. 8 See Morisot, 1986, p. 40. 9 For the definition of Northern European art, see Jeffrey Chipps Smiths’s The Northern Renaissance, in which the author defines “the geographic reach” of his book as extending from “Cracow to Paris and from the North Sea to the Alps,” and in which “the reader will journey across France, the Low Countries and the German-speaking lands” between the late fourteenth century and approximately 1580, “when artists in Paris and the Netherlands transformed the appearance of northern European art.” Supported by civic and burgher patronage, the new artists’s “curiosity about the individual and the natural world was valued more than a renewed dialogue with antiquity”: Chipps 2004, pp. 7-12. Also see Fry, 1951 and Cuttler, 1968. 10 See Jacques-Emile Blanche and Antonin Proust’s report of these words of Emile Zola on Manet: ”Ce peintre révolté, qui adorait le monde, avait toujours rêvé le succès tel qu’il pousse à Paris, avec les compliments des femmes, l’accueil louangeur des salons, la vie luxueuse galopant au milieu des admirations de la foule.”: in Cailler, 1945, p. 138.

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Mainardi, 1985. See Reff, 1964. 13 “Peintre d’histoire était la plus sanglante injure qu’on pût adresser à un artiste. Il professait le plus grand mépris pour les peintres qui s’enferment avec des modèles, des costumes, des mannequins et des accessoires, qui font des tableaux morts quand il y a, disait–il, tant de choses vivantes à faire au dehors.”: in Pierre Courthion, ed., Manet raconté par lui-même et par ses amis, Pierre Cailler Editeur, Vésenaz-Genève, 1945, p. 25. 14 Souvenirs d’Antonin Proust, in Pierre Courthion, ed., Manet raconté par luimême et par ses amis, Pierre Cailler Editeur, Vésenaz-Genève, 1945, p. 27 15 Champfleury, 1973, pp. 70-4. 16 See Kane, 1988-1989. 17 See Duret, 1910, p. 49 and p. 171. 18 Among the private museums accessible to visitors in Paris, the Galignani guide also lists collections of paintings by living masters (such as the collections of the Baron J. Rothschild, at 17 rue Laffitte; of Mme Paturle, at 21 rue du ParadisPoissonnière, open only in winter; of Mr A. Moreau, at 3 rue St-Georges), collections of Antiquities and Curiosities (such as Mr d’Yvon’s at 20 rue de la Chaise), Numismatics (Mr Rollin’s at 12 rue Vivienne), Herbaries (Mr Adrien de Jussieu’s at the Jardin des Plantes). Also accessible “upon proper introduction” were the following collections of paintings: Baron James Rothschild’s, at 19 rue Laffitte; M. de Rothschild’s at 40 rue Taitbout; the Marquis of Hertford’s at 2 rue Laffitte; the Marquis Maison’s at 24 rue Neuve des Capucines and M. Dagnan’s collection of Swiss scenery paintings at 35 rue St.-Georges: Galignani,1866, pp. 104-5. 19 See Reff, 1970 that followed Michael Fried’s “Manet’s Sources”: see Fried, 1969. 20 See on the relationship between power, art and luxury in France: Silverman, 1989 and DeJean, 2005. 21 Belting, 2001, p. 119. 22 The bourgeois egalitarian sociability of the circle differs both from a popular social life (one with less time and less money at one’s disposal, and often of an illiterate kind) and from the vain, mondaine, and aristocratic salon life centered on one individual: see Agulhon, 1977, pp. 17-22, p. 51 and pp. 82-4. 23 Tamar Garb lists for example the Cercle de l’ Union on the boulevard des Capucines, the Cercle des Arts Libéraux, the Cercle de lUnion Artistique in place Vendôme, and the Cercle artistique et littéraire of the rue Volney, which existed in the 1860s and organised art exhibitions while functioning as leisure clubs. In the 1870s and 1880s we find the merely professional societies centred on artists’ medium and subject matter, such as the Société des Aquarellistes, the Société des Pastellistes, the Société de blanc et noir, the Société des Animaliers Français, etc.: see Garb, 1989. Also see Cain Hungerford, 1989 for a discussion of the founding in 1890 of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in the schism led by Ernest Meissonier from the Société des Artistes Français which had been managing the Paris Salon since 1880. 12

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Bouillon, 1986. The Société du Jing-Lar, operating in 1868-69, by a détournement of its Japonisant name referred to the ginglard, the cheap French wine drank in abundance by its eight members during the ritual Sunday dinner held once a month at Marc-Louis Solon’s house, in Sèvres. The members were the republicans Bracquemond, Fantin-Latour, Astruc, Solon, Burty, Alphonse Hirsch, Jacquemart and Albert Mérat. As Bouillon has established, the only purpose of the seemingly esoteric society of friends was to mock the intentions of more serious societies, whether artistic or political or both. Bracquemond, the leader of the Jing-Lar, had also been the founder of the Société des Aquafortistes, which had gone bankrupt in 1867: see Bouillon, 1978. The Vilains Bonhommes existed around 1869-70 until just after the Franco-Prussian war. Its members were republicans who met once a month to dine together at cabarets of the Left Bank. Before being evicted for bad behaviour, Rimbaud attended some of these dinners with the other friends: FantinLatour, Cabaner, Théodore Banville, Verlaine, Régamey, Camille Pelletan, Bracquemond, Mérat, the Cros brothers, Etienne Carjat, André Gill and others: see Pia, 1962. 26 Degas, 1947, pp. 235-6. 27 He was also working on another version of the same painting, left unfinished, which he defined as “less complicated and more spontaneous, better art, where the people are all in summer dress, white walls, a sea of cotton on the tables.”: Degas, 1947, pp. 29-32. 28 Quoted in Degas, 1988, pp. 185-8. 29 Soussloff, 2006, pp. 5-8 and p. 27. Soussloff demonstrates that a social theory of portraiture, and a social history of art, had been established in Vienna in the early twentieth century. The art historians of the Viennese school (Alois Riegl, Jakob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Ernst Gombrich, Hans and Erica Tietze), in whose wake Soussloff declaredly places her intellectual work, brought philosophy and psychoanalysis “in the quest for an understanding of the subject in representation in the twentieth century” in their belief that “the power of art” resides in its ability “to offer a visual alternative to textual explanations of the human condition.” : Soussloff, 2006, pp. 2-3. 30 See Riegl, 1902; also see Price, 2000 for a history of Dutch society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 31 Berger jr, 2007, p. 105, p. 209 and p. 61. The book is a reading of Rembrandt’s Night Watch and other Dutch group portraits of military guilds as constructions of the masculine homo-social bond at the height of capitalism and commodity culture in Dutch society, when men were confronting a “feminization of culture” and increasingly strong and independent women in the family and in society: Berger jr, 2007, pp. 105-9. Maurice Agulhon had also noted that the modernity of the bourgeois cercle as form of sociability resided in its collectivization of life and in its all-male membership in times of rising liberalism: Agulhon, 1977, p. 51. Furthermore, Debora Silverman analyses French Art Nouveau as a symptom of the feminisation of culture at the turn of the nineteenth-century, when France was conflating its international identity with its economy of the luxury market through 25

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a political endorsement of the avant-garde and of the feminine: see Silverman, 1989. The pattern delineating itself here is that in times of modernity/regimes of capitalism (England and Holland in the seventeenth-century, France in the nineteenth-century) a rising feminisation of culture pushes men to bond in groups. 32 Hobsbawn 33 For Brilliant, too, in Un Atelier aux Batignolles, under the auspices of Minerva is placed the group of intellectuals as a whole: Brilliant, 1991, p. 96. According to Rand, in Un Atelier aux Batignolles Fantin-Latour “wove the strong associations” and “insinuations of theoretical and artistic concerns” that Manet had stated in “the spiritual forerunner” of Fantin-Latour’s group portrait, his own Portrait d’Emile Zola (1867-68, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). In Manet’s portrait of Zola, “nothing is accidental; all has been arranged to express those interests that the artist shared with his subject”: “Manet’s standards of ideal European painting, his own artistic enterprise, and the beacon of Oriental art by which he and Zola charted the direction of modern art are all reposited together”: Rand, 1987, pp. 50-2. 34 Which he continued to attend until they moved on to the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes in the early 1870s and then on to the Café de Châteaudun. 35 Brilliant, 1991, pp. 95-6. 36 Berger jr, 2007, p. 46. 37 Duret, 1910, p. 53. 38 See on this Berger jr, 2007, especially pp. 39-43. 39 Interior or The Rape, 1868-69, oil on canvas, cm 81.3 x 114.3, The Philadelphia Museum of Art. 40 Degas, 1947, p. 235. See Reff, 1972; Sidlauskas, 1993; Loyrette in Degas, 1988, pp. 143-46, and John House’s “Degas’s ‘Tableau de genre’,” in Kendall and Pollock, eds., pp. 80-94. 41 See Krämer, 2007. 42 Sulking, 1869-71, oil on canvas, cm 32.4 x 46.4, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. See Loyrette in Degas, 1988, pp. 146-48 and Reff for the identification of the sitters as Emma Dobigny and Edmond Duranty. 43 Miles, 2004. 44 As Green argued against a Marxist theory of art, the displayed object is not a simple product in the commercial exchange between the producer, the distributor and the consumer, a perspective which although “appearing to boast a material analysis, the crude imposition of economic methods and data blanks out all the cultural effects of the marketing process.” Furthermore, in this view, “the window displays of the rue Laffitte carry little independent weight or value,” as they become “merely a duct through which the already closed text/product is propelled towards the reader/consumer.” In proposing a truly historical approach to the study of the nineteenth-century art system, combining “cultural analysis of the economic at the same moment as economic analysis of the cultural,” Nicholas Green argued firstly for engaging as much with the art objects and structures as with “those nonartistic cycles that art simultaneously inhabits-leisure, education, décor.” Secondly, Green argued for a consideration of the circuits of consumption (the art-dealer‘s shop-window) as being as “equally important as the moment of production in the

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projection of cultural meanings.” In nineteenth-century Paris, circuits of production and circuits of consumption, as Green discussed, were not new phenomena linked to industrial capitalism and related notions of Parisian modernity, hollow consumerism and “society of spectacle,” but a “key sign in the complex rituals of mid-century Parisian culture.” Parisian culture was a powerful metropolitan culture of visual display that “cut across economic class lines, pulling into its symbolic orbit all those who identified with Paris; as much progressive Orleanist aristocrats as financial notables, as much provincial readers of the Parisian press as those literary intellectuals that celebrated the city.” : Green, 1989. 45 See Miles, 2004, p. 8. 46 Vollard, 1995. A few addresses of art dealers: Georges Petit was in the rue de Sèze; Goupil & Cie had a showroom in the boulevard Montmartre, one in the place de l’Opéra, and a private mansion with gallery at 9 rue Chaptal; Père Tanguy had a little shop in the rue Clauzel, Hector Brame in the rue de Choiseul. 47 Geffroy, 1922, p. 54 and Rewald, 1946, pp. 286-90. 48 Lottman, 1982, pp. 12-3. 49 Richard D. Sonn, “Marginality and Transgression. Anarchy’s Subversive Allure” in Weisberg, ed. , 2001, pp. 120-41. 50 Lottman , 2001, p. 53 and p. 10. Lottman’s Man Ray’s Montparnasse is the history of the centre of avant-garde Europe between the early years of the twentieth century and 1940, seen through the eyes of Man Ray, who arrived in Montparnasse in 1921 to discover that it “was a section of Paris that welcomed people speaking his kind of French,” where the cafés specialised to cater for patrons of different nationalities. It was “less a neighbourhood or urban district than a state of mind” and “a pastoral meeting ground for scholars and poets, becoming all the more inviting when outdoor cafés and dance floors began to dot the landscape.”: pp. 19-23. Also see Lottman’s The Left Bank for a political and cultural history of the Paris Left Bank, “that narrow strip of old houses and older streets along the Seine where writers and artists lived and worked” between 1935 and 1950. As Lottman writes, that territory and those chronological limits “encompass the rise and fall of the committed intellectual”: Lottman, 1982, pp. xixiv. 51 On Situationism, see Sadler and Hussey, 2006. 52 Quote in Green, 1989. 53 See Venturi, 1970 and Assouline, 2004. 54 In 1896 Vollard moved to larger premises at 6 rue Laffitte. As AthanassoglouKallmyer writes, “Vollard’s choice of a prime location reveals his remarkable entrepreneurial knack to exploit time, place and circumstance. His aggressive, bold tactics aiming at establishing himself among his competitors were prompted in great part by his status as a marginal in the capital, as a colonial outsider seeking integration in the professional and social mainstream of the motherland.”: see Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, 2003, p. 235. 55 Vollard, 1995, p. 127 56 See Hancock, 2003. 57 Delvau, 1862, p. 4.

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Delvau, 1862, pp. 103-14. Delvau, 1862, p. 4, pp. 64-5 and p. 296. 60 Geffroy, 1922, p. 61 Privat d’Anglemont, 1861, p. 81. 62 See Lethève, 1968, p. 63 As we know from a letter of Manet to Emile Zola of 7 May 1866, where we read: “Dear Monsieur Zola, I don’t know where to find you to shake your hand and tell you how proud and happy I am to be championed by a man of your talent, what a splendid article [in L’Evénement, 7 May], a thousand thanks. Your previous article (Le moment artistique) [4 May] was quite remarkable and made a great impression. I would like to consult you about something. Where could we meet? I’m at the Café de Bade, 26 boulevard des Italiens, every day from 5.30 to 7 o’clock, if that should suit you.Until then I am, dear sir, …your much obliged and appreciative Edouard Manet”: in Wilson-Bareau, 1991, p. 38. 64 Delvau, 1862, p. 254. 65 Duret wrote: “As an artist who had suffered persecution, who had been expelled from the Salons, and excommunicated by the representatives of official art, he was naturally marked out for the place of leadership among a group of men whose one common feature, in art and literature, was the spirit of revolt.”: Duret, 1910, pp. 109-10. 66 As Manet wrote to Zola in late April-May 1868 on the appearance of the second edition of Thérèse Raquin with a new preface: “Bravo, my dear Zola, it’s a splendid preface and you are standing up not only for a group of writers but for a group of artists as well I must say that someone who can fight back as you do must really enjoy being attacked.”: Wilson-Bareau, 1991, p. 45. 67 Silvestre, 1892, p. 161, and Rivière, 1921. Manet’s drawing: pen and ink, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, Mass. 68 See Berhaut, 1968. 69 In the same letter Manet went back on the subject of Degas: “Tell Degas it’s about time he wrote to me, I gather from Duranty he is becoming a painter of ‘high life’; why not? It’s too bad he didn’t come to London, those well-trained horses would have inspired a few pictures. Have you heard anything about the Stevens and whether they still entertain?” : letter of 26 August 1868, in Wilson-Bareau, 1991, p. 49. 70 In 1866 Degas exhibited The Steeplechase and in 1867 the Portrait de Famille (today known as The Bellelli Family. In 1868 the Salon Jury admitted his Portrait de Mlle E. F.; à propos du ballet de La Source (today known as Mlle Eugénie Fiocre in the Ballet of La Source . In 1870 Degas showed the Portrait de Mme Camus and the Portrait de Mme Gobillard. 71 The letter is published in Reff, 1968. 72 Bazille wrote to his parents in the Spring of 1867 that he wouldn’t send any more works to the Salon: “It is far too ridiculous…to be exposed to these administrative whims. What I say here, a dozen young people of talent think along with me. We have therefore decided to rent each year a large studio where we’ll exhibit as many works as we wish”: Bazille, 1992, p. 137. 59

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Ward, 1991. Degas informed his patron, the tenor and actor Jean-Baptiste Faure, in a letter written from Turin in December 1873: “This is where an ill wind has cast me, at Turin. My father was en route for Naples, he fell ill here and left us without any news of himself and when we found him at last it was I who had to leave immediately to look after him, and I find myself tied for some time to come, far from my painting and my life, in the heart of Piedmont.” Degas felt the distance separating him from his work and from Paris, and a few lines below, in the same letter, he used a telling image to comment both on his feeling of alienation from Paris and his daily life as a painter and on the burning of the Opera theatre, which had put Faure himself off work: “Well, here we both are far removed from our own theatres. Even if mine did not burn down it is just as if it had. I act no more”. In these lines Degas refers to Paris as his theatre, just as the Opera was Faure’s theatre, and compares Faure’s resignation to his own sense of psychological unease in a space that is not his. This image, Degas’ own image of Paris as his theatre, as his set for his situations, acquires a powerful significance when we consider Degas’ engagement with the Impressionist installations on the Paris boulevards: Degas, 1947, pp. 36-7. 75 When it became clear that Manet would not join the Society, preferring the more heroic attitude of exhibiting at the Salon, where he presented La Gare SaintLazare, Degas no longer thought that Manet’s presence was necessary to the cause of the Society: see his letter to Tissot, written just prior to the exhibition of 1874, in Degas, 1947, pp. 38-9. 76 Degas, 1947, pp. 37-8. 77 Morisot, 1986, p. 110. 78 Degas, 1947, pp. 38-9. 79 See for instance Fénéon, 1920. 80 The issue of the relationship between the avant-garde engagement of an artist and his personal character and social behaviour was raised by Bouillon in an article of 1975 devoted to the portraits of Manet executed by Bracquemond. Bouillon pointed out that the art historian dealing with aspects of Manet’s iconography and personality should be less concerned with the biographical and hagiographic anecdote (stereotypically revolving around the fact that Manet was by all accounts a polite and charming man) than with the problematic issue of the relationship between Manet’s revolutionary painterly practice and the “conservatisme” or at least the “traditionnalisme” of his personality and social conduct. The issue had been distinctly outlined, but not resolved, in 1867 by Zola in his preface to the catalogue of Manet’s one-man show 1867, where he had articulated the three levels of the painterly practice as being “L’homme et l’artiste, les oeuvres, le public”: Zola is quoted in Bouillon, 1975. 81 See Piceni, 1932. 82 In his letter, Pissarro was recalling the circumstance in which Degas had bought two canvases by Paul Gauguin at the sale of works, held in the winter of 1891, by means of which Gauguin was trying to raise funds for his trip to Tahiti: Pissarro, 1943, p. 170. 74

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83 See Bouillon, 1986 for the link between the motivations of the 1874 exhibition and Durand-Ruel’s financial struggles. 84 Giuseppe De Nittis recorded the episode. Commenting his own reception of the Legion of Honour in front of Degas and another friend, Manet said “Il faut avoir de tout ce qui vous sort du nombre [..] Dans cette chienne de vie toute de lutte, qui est la nôtre, on n’est jamais trop armé.” Degas replied as follows: “Naturellement, ce n’est pas d’aujourd’hui que je sais à quel point vous êtes bourgeois.” It is hard to overlook the political meaning of the word that Degas perhaps meant as an insult, “bourgeois,” and which, by the way, did not detract from Degas’s reiterated acknowledgement of Manet’s artistic merit: see De Nittis, 1895, p. 188. Pissarro, who found Manet to be a “man of charm,” also shared Degas’s ideas on Manet’s petty side, his belief in success: see Pissarro, 1943, p. 26 and p. 50. 85 Listed in the catalogue: Examen de danse au théâtre (belonged to M. Faure); Classe de danse (belonged to M. Brandon); Intérieur de Coulisse (belonged to M. Rouart); Blanchisseuse (belonged to M. Brandon); Départ des Courses (sketch, drawing); Faux Départ (drawing à l’essence); Répétition de ballet sur la scène (drawing, belonged to M. Mulbacher); Une blanchisseuse (pastel, belonged to M. Brandon); Après le Bain (sketch, drawing); Aux Courses en Province (belonged to Faure; also known as The Carriage at the Races, oil on canvas, cm 36.5x 55.9, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). 86 See Rivière, 1921, pp. 43-4. 87 Rewald, 1946, p. 253. 88 Ward, 1991, pp. 599-622. 89 See Burty, 1874; also see Philippe Burty’s article “Exposition de la Société Anonyme des Artistes” from La République Française of 25 April 1874 and Castagnary’s article, “L’exposition du boulevard des Capucines,” from Le Siècle of 29 April 1874, reprinted in Impressionism, 1974, pp. 261-62 and pp. 264-65. Also see Moffett, 1986, pp. 118-23. 90 The nineteen exhibitors included Caillebotte, Lepic, Levert, de Nittis, Béliard, Leros, Cals, Millet, Sisley, Monet, Tillot, Morisot, Ottin, Desboutin, Pissarro, Bureau, Renoir, Morisot, François, Rouart. Degas’s 22 or 24 works hung at the end of the show, in the third room. Also see Degas’s Notebook 26, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 123-26. 91 Quoted in Geffroy 1922, p. 65-6 and in Duret, 1910, p. 115. 92 Rivière, 1921, p. 152. 93 Lecomte, Camille Pissarro and Fénéon, « Les cadres » in Oeuvres plus que complètes, 1970, I, p. 411 and « l’impressionnisme aux Tuileries », ibid., p. 56 94 In 1880 Huysmans noted Pissarro’s prints exhibited with yellow mats and purple frames and in 1881 he commented on the presence of individually designed frames: Huysmans, L’Art Moderne and Cahn, 1989, pp. 76-7. 95 Cahn, 1989, p. 7. 96 See Newbery, 2002. 97 See Grieve, 1973; Horowitz, 1979-1980 and Cahn, 1989, pp. 63-4. 98 Cahn, 1989, pp. 10-13 and pp. 25-31.

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99 See Havemeyer. According to Vollard, if Degas trusted the buyer and sold the artwork without a frame of his choice, he recommended services of his framer, Lézin, and wanted to choose the frame himself. If a buyer dared to change the frame chosen by Degas in favour of a gilded one, the painter would simply return the money and take the artwork back. Once, recalls Vollard, Degas had been invited to dinner by some of his old friends. From the entrance door, Degas noted that one of his paintings had been given a gilded frame. He went straight to take down the painting, taking it out of the frame with the help of a coin. He then went away with the canvas under his arm and his friends, who had assumed that an expensive gilded frame might not be good enough for Degas, never saw him again: Vollard, 1995, pp. 118-21. 100 Lilley, 2007. 101 See Notebook 31, in Reff 1976 b, I, pp. 135-38. 102 Havard, quoted in Reutersvärd, 1979. 103 Claretie quoted in Reutersvärd, 1979. The entry ‘éclaireur’ in Le Petit Robert: “Soldat envoyé en reconnaissance,” p. 825. In English, it is a scout. 104 Ward, 1991. 105 In the late 1870-80s Degas tried to achieve in his works the mat effect achieved in distemper on canvas by Andrea Mantegna, who had been an experimenter himself, whose distemper work, the grisaille titled Judgement of Salomon, had survived unvarnished was in the Louvre during Degas’ lifetime: Callen, 1994. 106 Held at a five-room apartment on the second floor at 1 rue Laffitte, at the corner of the boulevard des Italiens. Berthe Morisot and her husband Eugène Manet had insisted another joint exhibition take place, but there was much debate over the presence in the show of Pissarro’s son Lucien and of friends Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, which Degas supported. They were finally admitted to participate in the show, exhibiting together in the last room. Shortly before the show electric lights had been installed in the show space. Other artists showing were Odilon Redon, Gauguin and his friend Schuffenecker. See Angoulvent, 1913, and Signac, 1964, remembering how Alfred Stevens made fun of the neo-Impressionist horrors that Degas had admitted to be exhibited.: Signac, p. 148. 107 Degas also told Vollard that he would have liked to paint frescoes, were it not that people “sont trop à la merci d’un bail.” He also feared that the fresco might be detached and put on canvas in order to be sold, and exclaimed: “Ah, si je pouvais être certain que ma peinture ne monterait pas! Enfin! ” : Vollard, 1995, pp. 120-21. 108 Chialiva, 1932. 109 Ward, 1991.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE PARIS OPERA

1. The Orchestra at the Opera This chapter discusses the spatial story that led Degas from practising voluntary portraiture of friends, especially musicians, to being the painter of the Paris Opera dancers, and the symbolic nature of this space in Degas’s life and works, as well as Degas’s adoption of the figure of the ballerina as a symbol for the avant-garde artist. Among his friends Degas could name numerous musicians, such as Suzanne Manet, Blanche Camus, Lorenzo Pagans, Emmanuel Chabrier. Degas also became acquainted with the siblings Désiré, Henri, and Marie Dihau, all musicians. Singer, pianist, and music teacher, Marie occasionally performed at Auguste Degas’s house and at a restaurant that Degas frequented. Désiré was a bassoonist at the Paris Opera. Marie and Désiré Dihau were among Degas’s earliest customers, as they commissioned and purchased two portraits from Degas: Mlle Dihau au Piano (Fig. 5-6) and The Orchestra of the Opera (1869-70, Fig. 7-1).1 In The Orchestra of the Opera, Degas portrayed Désiré playing the bassoon in the orchestra of the Paris Opera. A few friends of Degas and Désiré also posed for the musicians appearing in the orchestra pit, as we will see. Désiré is also seen in Musicians in the Orchestra of 1870-71 (Fig. 7-2) and in profile he appears in The Ballet of ‘Robert le Diable’ (Fig. 7-4). The fact that the Dihaus commissioned and purchased their portraits by Degas was an important step in his career. Furthermore, The Orchestra of the Opera, which belonged to Désiré, was also exhibited in Lille, the Dihaus’s native town, in 1870, and at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris in early 1871, sanctioning Degas’s taking of the city. His family finally acknowledged that Degas could finish “a real painting.”2 This was the victory of Degas’s spatial strategy of painting non-commissioned portraits of sitters in their environments.

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Fig. 7-1 The Orchestra of the Opera, 1869-70, oil on canvas, cm 56.5 x 46.2, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Fig. 7-2 Musicians in the Orchestra, 1872, oil on canvas, cm 69 x 49, Städtische Galerie, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.

For at least a decade, Degas had been painting non-commissioned portraits of acquaintances, within his autobiographical enterprise modelled on Van Dyck’s Iconographia. He had been studying friends and acquaintances in their environment, bringing his sketches back to his studio to execute their portraits. In moving thus back and forth from private home to artist’s workplace, Degas established a spatial practice

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which moved through the social and cultural life that he intended to paint, that is, his personal world. This practice, which involved targeted itineraries of overlapping spaces and social relationships, was intended by Degas as a way of establishing an urban professional identity and of occupying a territory of his own. The process of establishing a reputation was not unlike a conquest of land, implying a strategy of inclusion and exclusion of movements and contacts. In visiting the homes of his friends and acquaintances to create portraits, he was making forays into a territory that he intended to conquer. Degas’s strategy was ultimately successful. The portraits of the Dihaus were sold, and the spatial strategy of conquest and appropriation that was behind them, to use Michel de Certeau’s term, established them as landmarks both in Degas’s “mental map” of Paris and in our mapping of Degas. This discussion of Mlle Dihau at the Piano and The Orchestra of the Opera uses the concepts of “spatial story” and that of “mental map” as theorised respectively by Michel de Certeau and Richard Rodger. For Certeau, the “spatial story” is one of the practices of everyday life by means of which people escape the rules imposed on them by the official system: by moving through urban space, individuals pursue trajectories or “spatial practices” that hold for them personal significance. These itineraries “secretly structure the determining conditions of social life,” writes Certeau.3 This concept is close to Rodger’s “mental map.” According to Rodger, individuals living in cities create their mental maps which include certain places of significance to them, while excluding those aspects that are not relevant to their life.4 In mapping Degas’s life and works, I use these concepts to reveal Degas as an avant-garde and bohemian artist who deviated from the old, pompous, and inadequate Salon- and State- commission system to engage in a struggle to find an alternative and personal itinerary through the private spaces of Paris. In Degas’s own self-centred mythology of the artist as hero of modern life, Degas was drawing up for himself an iconography/autobiography that was a spatial strategy of conquest and affirmation. With his friend Désiré Dihau, bassoonist at the Opera, Degas was also provided with the link in the spatial story that led him to paint the world of professional performers, musicians, and dancers of the Opera, and that eventually would earn him the reputation of the painter of dancers.5 With Dihau, Degas was able to extend his interest in portraying artistes to the world of professional musicians.6 This concern on Degas’s part was consistent with his portraits of other Parisian artistes he had been painting during the 1860s. In choosing to depict the Opera and its performers, Degas was trying to establish a reputation by means of social and professional contacts in a manner close to an invasion: by occupying

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spaces, creating paths and passages, gaining ground and establishing a new territory for himself. The connection and intellectual exchange between visual artists, poets, and musicians in avant-garde circles were very tight during the 1860s. They all exalted Wagner against Verdi and against the grand style of the Italian opera, a further instance of the elective, self-fashioned, and anti-classicist Northern-ness of these artists. Degas, Fantin-Latour, Whistler, and Bazille painted many musical subjects, so did Renoir, who even portrayed Wagner in Palermo in 1882. We know that Fantin-Latour portrayed avant-garde musicians, poets, and artists, both individually and in group portraits that throw light on the dynamics of the Parisian artistic circles in the second half of the nineteenth century. Fantin-Latour also painted literary, mythological, and symbolic scenes taken from, or inspired by, the operas or instrumental pieces of Wagner, Schumann, and other German musicians.7 Degas, instead, focused on the musician at work, the artist in her or his typical gestures or attitudes, as we have seen with the Dihaus or Pagans. A few of the musicians appearing in The Orchestra of the Opera were actually musicians of the Paris Opera orchestra, like the cellist LouisMarie Pilet, seated at the left-hand side, and the flutist Joseph-Henri Altès. Désiré Dihau, Pilet and Altès were also friends, a relationship to which the image alludes. Degas in fact groups the three musicians by linking their persons in a semi-circular movement in the foreground of the picture. He also portrayed them individually, in Le Violoncelliste Pilet (1869, Musée d’Orsay) and in Joseph-Henri Altès (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In these individual portraits of musicians, Degas referred to the tradition of Northern European painting. In his portrait of Pilet, who sits with his pen and music scores, Degas posed him according to the iconography of the scholar, like in Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Scholar (1631, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg), or Watteau’s (Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon). In this iconographic tradition of the portrait of the secretary or member of a society or a corporation (the Opera for Pilet), the sitter, interrupted in his work, shows the attributes of the scholar, the pen in his hand, and the open book. This reference to eighteenth-century French Rococo art, the Northern strand of French art, rooted as it is in both Flemish and Dutch art,8 was of a particular interest in 1869-1870, when hundreds of works of the French, Dutch, and Flemish schools entered the French national collections through the La Caze Bequest.9 At the death of Dr La Caze, in September 1869, 583 works by such painters as Rembrandt, Chardin, Pater, Largillière, Fragonard, and Watteau, entered the Louvre, where, in March 1870, the Salle La Caze was inaugurated by Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie. Centred on French

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painting of the eighteenth century, the Salle La Caze displayed, in three rows, 275 paintings donated by the collector whom Degas had known since youth. The artworks of the La Caze gallery would soon be the object of caricature in La Vie Parisienne of 23 April 1870, but despite this, with this donation, the predecessors of the Realist avant-garde had gained their place in the Louvre, that is, in the national art-historical canon.10 The painting of these Rococo maîtres, whom avant-garde culture had been championing for decades, finally found its place in the Louvre. Their small, vivid images of quickly painted figures and still-lifes stood for individualism, bourgeois freedom, Parisian-ness, and Northern matter-offactness. These were the revolutionary ideas to which Degas was subscribing by way of reference to eighteenth-century French art in his 1870 portraits of musicians of the Paris Opera. It was the proclamation of his Parisian-ness and of his position in the debate around the essence of French art: this was not to be found in classicism, but in the Northern baroque. In his decision to become the painter of the most Parisian of institutions, the Opera, Degas was first and foremost embracing this historic Northern link, proceeding from the Dutch, Flemish, and French artists of the eighteenth century. The Opera became for Degas a geography of self-representation and self-conception, which was real and symbolic at once in his spatial practice and in his mental map. The Opera was a locus which provided Degas with two ideas: the first was a reflection on the existential condition of the modern artist as urban worker, which Degas saw in the symbolic dimension of the Paris Opera. The second was a modernist notion of theatre as summation of all the arts, a Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk that was a lively topic of discussion in Paris since Wagner had premiered Tannhäuser at the Paris Opera in 1861. This topic would have struck a chord with Degas, considering his regard for music and for musicians, and especially his links with Wagnerians such as Suzanne Manet, Blanche Camus, Victoria Dubourg, and Emmanuel Chabrier. The latter in fact also appears in Degas’s The Orchestra of the Opera: his head appears in profile in the Opera box in the upper right-hand corner of the picture. Chabrier was an enfant prodige pianist and composer, who worked as a civil servant at the Ministry of the Interior. Degas met him at the Manets’ evenings, where Chabrier played the piano, sharing with the talented Suzanne Manet and with Baudelaire, and other Parnassian poets, a militant Wagnerism that signalled their avant-gardism and modernity.11 In the course of the years, Chabrier bought works by Manet and other modernists, and frequently dedicated his own musical compositions to them, to Manet and his wife Suzanne, for example. In

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1873, newly married, Chabrier moved to a home in the rue Mosnier, close to Manet’s atelier, where he was portrayed by him. Tissot and FantinLatour also portrayed Chabrier.12 At the time Degas included him in his The Orchestra of the Opera of 1869, Chabrier was no more a successful musician than Degas was a famous painter, but their reputations were established within circles of avant-garde artists, poets, and writers, such as Manet and Nina de Villard.13 For Loyrette Orchestra at the Opera is a turning point in the painter’s work, marking the passage of his interest from the orchestra to the dance and the stage scene. But it is evident that at this point Degas’s interest in dancers was still secondary to his interest in musicians. Even in Musicians in the Orchestra (Fig. 7-2), executed later, in 1871-72, the dancers appeared originally only as a row of legs, their figures being cut at the waistline. Only in March 1874, when his interest for the Opera dancer had become central, did Degas decide to ask the singer Jean-Baptiste Faure (who had purchased the work from Durand-Ruel) to return Musicians in the Orchestra to him so he could add a strip of canvas to it. Degas then gave the dancers a whole body, and a stage background of green leafy trees. At this date, the ballerina mattered to Degas not simply because it had proved to be a successful theme with the art dealer Durand-Ruel, but also because it raised the issue of the modern artist’s fate at a crucial moment of Degas’s life. Auguste had died in February 1874, leaving his children with considerable debts to pay. This situation disadvantaged Edgar in particular, as he, now head of the family, had to adapt his work to the new financial necessities. But that Degas from this moment committed himself nearly exclusively to the painting of dance scenes was only in part an act of opportunism bound to the commercial success of the dance paintings. For Degas, the ballerina told a poignant story of art making as hard work, based on repetition and training of little variation, a story to which Degas could personally relate both his vision of artistic work and his distressed financial and social situation. The ballerina, then, supplanted the musician as hero of modern life. Loyrette has observed that the reason why Degas began to paint ballerinas was that, associating with musicians and other artists linked to the Paris Opera, such as the painter and costume designer Lepic, and the playwright Halévy, “gave Degas a clearer understanding of the special world he had only glimpsed through Eugénie Fiocre.”14 This is not untrue, but it eludes the important question of why Degas perceived the world of the dancer as special. In my interpretation, the ballerina became central to Degas for many reasons. Firstly, it was a motif consistent, in his oeuvre, with his earlier depiction of Parisian artistes, such as painters and musicians. Secondly,

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the ballerina came to embody a disenchanted vision of the artist’s work. The question of work was a complex one for Degas. At times, the painter’s notebooks unveil his romantic, if not catastrophic, understanding of the artist’s vocation as a doomed condition of frustration that he found expressed in the painter’s name, “De la Croix.”15 This idea of the artist’s condition as saturnine vocation runs parallel to Degas’s attitude towards marriage, which he refused all his life, while often complaining with great pains of solitude, and of missing a wife and children. Both the heroic status of the artist and the appropriateness of unmarried life for the artist were posed by Balzac as prescriptions for the modern and integral realist artist, the hero of modern life. Degas chose to follow these. In his letters and notebooks, it appears that Degas at times found it hard to comply with these Balzacian prescriptions, but this may have been a pose meant to enhance his heroism, as Degas did, after all, choose to embrace just this vision of the modern artist, and of his or her “floating existence” in the big city, as Baudelaire saw it.16 Degas committed himself to the heroism of modern life in the Balzacian topoi of both the status of celibacy and the status of the artist as ballerina and thoroughbred, and here one finds an instance of Degas’s modernity and avant-gardism which further denies the old and superficial image of Degas as a stale and conservative bourgeois. As Van Gogh noted and discussed, sex and food ranked low, beneath art, in Degas’s monkish life, as will be discussed in the following chapter of this book. The rhetoric of art making as heroic struggle became the dominant, if not obsessive, theme of his realist and Northern painting of dancers and horses. The ballerina, like the horse, was a symbol for the artist, as Balzac had told Gautier, who then told Baudelaire.17 Baudelaire venerated in Balzac the “beacon” of the Realist avant-garde and the most heroic of the heroes of modern life, a heroic modernity that could be found as much in the “spectacle of modern life” as in “the thousands of floating existences” moving in the city.18 It was Baudelaire who passed these images on to the avant-garde through his discourse on Balzac and on the modern artist in Théophile Gautier, notice littéraire, published in 1859, a text that Degas knew.19 This discourse on the artist interested Degas, who had already made it his specialisation to paint artists, and the topical explains Degas’s attachment to the figures of the dancer and of the horse. How did this discourse on the modern artist affect Degas? He realised that the artist’s experience of the world was not different in nature from that of the racing horse or dancer. The dancer went from being a reflection of the social element in Degas’s life, encountered along the trajectories of his spatial practice, to being a central theme in his painting, also because it offered

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itself as a comparison, in which the reiterative experience and processes of art making were continuously recreated. In this interweaving of different contexts in Degas’s mental map, the social and urban context of his friendship with Désiré Dihau led Degas to the social and urban world of the Opera, a world that is both real and fictional. By physically appropriating the Opera as a location from which to draw artistic subjects, Degas was also appropriating for himself the territory of Theatre, of Representation, the very symbolic context of the Artwork. For Degas, who was not a habitué of the Opera, this venue was less a real space than a symbolic space of Art, a space of interaction between the real and the symbolic, a space on which Degas could meditate: the Opera as space of the life of the artist, and a metaphor for the artist’s condition and experience of the world. Through his spatial practice of social connections and progress through the city, the Paris Opera came to be, in Degas’s mental map, a symbolic space for the experience of art making, the Wagnerian total work of art. Such empathetic understanding and sense of belonging is at the root of Degas’s commitment to the painting of dancers in the 1870s.

Fig. 7-3 Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet of ‘La Source’, 1867, oil on canvas, cm 130 x 145, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York

2. Theatre scenes before 1870 In 1867 Degas had painted his first theatre scene, Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet of ‘La Source’ (Fig. 7-3), portraying a famous dancer and actress of

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the day. Eugénie Fiocre played the role of Nouredda in Arthur SaintLéon’s ballet La Source. In Degas’s painting, Fiocre is sitting between two attendants and a horse drinking from a stream. The dancer and the horse appear together. Furthermore, this horse is linked to a small work in wax that is considered to be Degas’s first sculpture.20 This painting has led scholars to wonder how, in 1867, the largely unknown Degas managed to encounter and portray such a Parisian celebrity. Fiocre posed in fact for established artists like Carpeaux.21 While it is probable that Degas attended the performance of La Source,22 it is unlikely that Fiocre posed for him. We should see the portrait of Fiocre, together with his Portrait of Pauline de Metternich, not as based on actual sittings but rather as figures within Degas’s Iconography, a fictive gallery of Parisian society women, painted after photographs or other media. Establishing whether Fiocre actually sat to Degas is important only in that it indicates that Degas’s Opera is a space where the boundaries between the real, the invented, and the symbolic are blurred. In fact, the Opera painting of 1867 betrays the detachment and alienation derived from having been painted from a picture of Fiocre, while The Orchestra of the Opera speaks of Degas and Désiré Dihau’s friendship. Both images, however, signal their quality of abstraction, defined as Degas’s Dutch-ness or Northern-ness, in their being a mix of fact and fiction, of memory and imagination. It is this modern mix of fact and fiction that Degas presents as a proof of having been there, as a proof of belonging and as a proof of Parisian-ness. From the very beginning, the Paris Opera house occupied an ambiguous place in Degas’s urban life: like the average Parisian, Degas did frequent the Opera and other theatres, but rarely. The Paris Opera, in Degas’s mental map, was more a symbolic than a real space, and in his painting the Opera becomes an invented space. In the Opera pictures, Degas integrated invention, as Edmond de Goncourt wrote, and reality/memory of the place which he had sometimes visited, with the perception of rooted-ness, belonging and selfidentity which the Opera came gradually to imply for Degas: it was both total work of art and theatre as paradigm of invented reality, and site and surrounding for the dancer’s existence, a spatial experience analogous to that of the painter in his studio.23 In the 1870s Degas went to the Opera only occasionally, and when he did so, he took notes. As he had done in 1867 with La Source, in 1870 or 1871 Degas actually saw a performance of the very popular Robert le Diable, an opera by Meyerbeer that had been performed since 1831. Perhaps Degas was also sitting in the first rows of the orchestra stalls of the Le Peletier Opera house, which were then reserved for men. While attending the show, Degas sketched from the stage sets, the costumes, and

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the musicians in the orchestra pit, adding notes on colours and other details.24 These turned out to be helpful for his 1871 painting, The Ballet of ‘Robert le Diable’ (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The upper half of the canvas is occupied by the décors: against the dark, deep stage set of the ruins of a medieval monastery, strewn with tombs, Degas re-enacted in bright whites the scene of the ballet of the ghost nuns. In the lower half, Degas lets the viewer look as if through a row of whitecollared heads sitting in the stalls, and through the heads and instruments of the orchestra musicians. Prominent is the profile of the bearded man looking up, in the direction of the loges, through a pair of binoculars. This man is considered by a few writers to be Albert Hecht, businessman and art collector.25 In the 1870s, from these theatre scenes, Degas moved on to the depiction of dancers and dance classes.

3. The dance classes Historians of Degas have been concerned about where Degas’s dance scenes are set and how faithful the painter is to the topographical reality of the Paris Opera houses, the question, that is, of Degas’s realism. In the discussion of the dance classes, the actual documentary value of these images has always been prominent, while the motivation behind the recurrence of such theme in Degas’s oeuvre, and the relative relevance of it in his life as an artist, has always been treated superficially. The latter issue, however, is essential in this discussion of Degas and of his modernity, which is found both in his transgressive approach to space, and in the technical and thematic aspects of his artworks. In his approach to space, Degas creates a space in which reality and imagination are combined freely, a modern space. As for the experimental nature of his works, Degas proclaims the avant-garde idea of the artist as artisan. In his obsessive themes, all centred on the idea of work as training and repetition, Degas reflects, symbolises and even celebrates the radical nature of his own vision of artistic engagement and self-image, and the obsessive nature of his own oeuvre. In Degas’s self-fashioning, this radicalism and obsession were meant to signify his genuine artistic engagement, his originality, and individual genius: his modernity and avant-gardism. It worked: in reviewing the first Impressionist exhibition in April 1874, Ernest Chesneau immediately labelled Degas as the painter of a characteristically Parisian artiste, the dancer. Even before that, in February 1874, Edmond de Goncourt had visited Degas in his studio, and had come out with the idea that Degas was an obsessive artist in relation to his dancers and laundresses.26 As a consequence, it becomes evident that

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Degas’s works must be discussed individually, if we want to understand his avant-gardism and how experimental, and improvisatory, he was in invention, technique, craft and working process. At the same time, however, since Degas’s theme is repetition, and most of his works are all versions of one another, one realises that a new consideration of Degas’s art cannot rehearse the exercise of commenting on so many dance or horse racing or bathing scenes which are virtually identical. We must approach Degas’s themes as a whole, but not before a discussion of a few of Degas’s dance classes of the 1870s, to clarify how they are both alike and different. What follows will also address the way in which art historians have treated Degas’s realism in his Opera scenes, that is, by limiting themselves to acknowledging Degas’s freedom of invention. In this study, instead, Degas’s space is read not as ambiguous, but as Dutch or, more broadly, Northern and avant-garde, meaning that Degas approached the territory and space of the Opera in a way not unlike the transgressive, realist, and inherently theatrical way in which seventeenth-century Dutch painters approached space and genres: nae‘t leven or uyt de gheest.27 Degas operated in his dance scenes a deliberate conquest of the Opera, an appropriation and occupation of territory and space that constitute the avant-garde action par excellence. The lack of evidence concerning Degas’s attendance at the premises of the Opera house around 1870 only allows one to speculate that it was probably through the Dihaus, or through the playwright Ludovic Halévy, that Degas could visit the backstage of the Opera in the rue Le Peletier, where he may have seen a dance class, or more than one, which inspired his first dance scenes in the very last months of 1871.28 One must bear in mind, though, that in a letter to his patron Albert Hecht, written sometime between 1879 and 1884, Degas begged Hecht to get him an entrance to the annual dance examination to be held at the Opera: Have you the power to get the Opera to give me a pass for the day of the dance examination, which, so I have been told, is to be on Thursday? I have done so many of these dance examinations without having seen them that I am a little ashamed of it.29

The specificity of Degas’s request (he was concerned with viewing dance examinations, not routine dance classes or rehearsals) does not constitute evidence that Degas had never seen any of the spaces or situations he was famous for being familiar with and for painting, but here Degas admitted his practice of painting scenarios he had never seen. He was not an Opera subscriber until 1882.30

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Degas’s earliest dance scenes were two dance classes, painted before his stay in America (between October 1872 and March 1873).The earliest of all is The Dance Class conserved in New York (Fig. 7-4). This very small oil on panel was executed towards the end of 1871. In the centre, we see a dancer in her white tutu and pink slippers, looking at the viewer with an expression of uncertainty in her face. She is ready to exercise, with her feet pointe en arrière, under the eye of the white-haired ballet master. The latter is sitting on the left-hand side against the piano, ready to give her the start with his violin. Behind the ballet master is a group of dancers, each one of them engaged in her movement, while one of them is closer to the master and, bent on the piano, has her eyes fixed on the dancer in the centre. The Dance Class shows a complex space, the deep perspective converging in a corner of the room, at the right side of which a large door is ajar. We see parts of the barre running along the wall, and a few dancers practising, their white tutus set off by the ochre walls. On the left-hand side, the space is saturated by not just the presence of the group of figures mentioned above, but also by the section of a door, a notice board, and by a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The mirror is a space-disrupting device, in which a facing window is reflected, allowing us a glimpse of the blue Paris sky, while the cheval glass reflects the figures of dancers: so many apertures, mirrors, and doors are the forms of specularity, reflection, and mise-enabîme claiming the space for other spaces, for the confusion and integration of the Gesamtkunstwerk that make what Christine BuciGlucksmann has defined as the baroque madness of vision.31 Also, these apertures, like in so many Baroque paintings from the Netherlands, allude to life going on behind doors. If the yellow walls meaningfully recall the walls in Johannes Vermeer, or Carel Fabritius, very Dutch and Flemish are also the pearls adorning the ears of the dancers. Pearls in iconology are linked with vanity, virginity, purity, and faith, and the very whiteness of these chalky dots and the black necklaces worn by two of Degas’s dancers recall immediately the black dress and white collars of the sitters in Dutch portraits of the Golden Age.32 This contrast is reinforced, and amplified, in Degas’s dance scene not just by the white, gaseous, tutus and the black dress of the ballet master, but by the motif of the black top hat at the lower left. The silky black top hat sits reversed, and a white sheet of paper sticks out of it. A still life that also includes, arranged at the foot of the grand piano, an olive-green watering can, and a black violin case. The minuteness and preciousness of the shiny sashes, and of the pink slippers, epitomise the fijn-schilderij, the Dutch quality of detailed-ness and smooth-ness of this little painting. Durand-Ruel bought The Dance Class in early 1872, and Degas immediately completed The Dance Class at the

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Opera in the rue Le Peletier (at the Musée d’Orsay).33 This is set in a large room of which we see such architectural details as the ornate frieze along the ceiling, and the semi-columns of purple marble which frame the large arched wall mirror. in which the reflection of a few exercising dancers are visible. A red brown line, running along the lower half of the walls, is the barre at which the dancers are practising. To the left, a large light wooden door is left open for us to see a window in the distance, the white gauze of a tutu, and a foot en pointe. Standing in front of this open door, in the lefthad corner of the picture, a dancer is waiting for the ballet master to give the start to her rehearsal.34 On the right-hand side, we see the current master of the Paris Opera ballet, the moustached Louis Mérante. He is dressed in white, leaning over his stick. Seated next to him is a violin player, the lectern open in front of him. The violinist and Mérante are surrounded by a group of dancers: one is seated in the foreground, her leg outstretched, two are turning their backs to us and reading a notice board, while three others are looking onto the dancer who is about to rehearse. In the middle foreground of the picture is a light wooden chair on which we see a white cloth and a red fan that directs our look around the space by recalling the red sash of a dancer on the right-hand side, and the red straight line of the barre.

Fig. 7-4 The Dance Class, 1871, oil on wood, cm 19.7 x 27, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

In his earlier dance class of 1871, with its blacks, whites, and yellows, Degas had wanted the tones and values of seventeenth-century Dutch

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painting. In the 1872 dance class at Orsay, Degas was less severe, but no less Northern painter: he imagined coloured sashes, and bows for the tutus of his dancers in pink slippers. Subtly, the strokes of pink, red, yellow and black evoke instead the joyful harmonies of eighteenth-century French painting which was being reappraised in the general revival of Northern European art.35

Fig. 7-5 The Dance Class, 187376, oil on canvas, cm 85.5 x 75, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The sense of Rococo movement and adornment is noteworthy in the gracefully reclined heads of the dancers: under their chignons, their porcelain skin is set off by the black ribbons around their necks, and warmed up by rouged cheeks, and all lit up by the white pearls at their ears. After his return from America in the spring of 1873, Degas resumed painting pictures of dance classes: The Dance Class (Fig. 7-5), dated between 1873 and 1876, features dancers taken in a group, but each seen in an informal pose: on the left-hand side, we are close to the backs of two dancers, one sitting on the piano, and scratching her back, while another, holding a fan, is watching a dancer exercising for the dance teacher, leaning on his stick in the centre-right. The eye of the beholder progresses diagonally across a long space to look out through the door and windows, and finally to the busy group of dancers in the background, sitting or rising to line up, the eye caught by the play of grains and textures of the paint, areas of skin and hair, gauze tutus, and striking green, pale yellow, and blue sashes. Having found in the ballet a congenial world, a world producing dramatic light and spaces, Degas also began a few images of ballet rehearsal on stage that are among the most experimental of his

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works. There exist three versions of a scene of ballet rehearsal on stage, all datable around 1874. The first that Degas executed is the largest of all, the canvas titled Ballet Rehearsal on Stage (Fig. 7-6).

Fig. 7-6 Ballet Rehearsal on Stage, 1874, oil on canvas, cm 65 x x 81, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

This is a grisaille which, as the authors of the 1988 catalogue have written, was probably destined to be the model for an engraving, but was altered and exhibited as a work in its own right at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, and immediately sold. The numerous pentimenti show through the thin paint.36 We see the Opera stage from one side, detecting ghostly figures through the décors, and we see the neatly drawn architecture of the theatre loges. An abonné in a black suit and top hat watches the rehearsal, sitting astride on a chair. Against this monochromatic background, Degas has distributed his dancers, rendered phantom-like by the artificial lights. On the left-hand side, a few dancers are resting: stretching, yawning, and bending, one of them turns her back to us, and so does the dancer in the foreground. She is scratching her back while being seated on a bench, over which her tutu is spreading, and one is recalled immediately of a passage in Degas Danse Dessin, in which Valéry wrote that Degas’s dancers are in fact not women, but jellyfish.37 The third group of dancers in the mid-background is rehearsing on stage: one of them is en pointe and has a raised arm. The two later versions are

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ink drawings on paper. In the Ballet Rehearsal on Stage (1874, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Degas worked over the pen and ink drawing with watercolour, essence, and pastel. In the other Ballet Rehearsal on Stage (also at the Metropolitan), Degas used essence and pastel over the ink drawing. Degas’s Opera paintings are therefore spaces conquered by the avant-garde artist; they are modern arrangements in the tradition of Northern genre painting, in which invention and reality melt into each other. In my reading of Degas’s space as the space conquered by the artist like the dancer conquers the theatre stage, the ballerina as symbol for the artist deserves its own discussion.

4. The dancer Since Degas’s lifetime, his creatures, painted or modeled in wax, have been viewed as machines. These entities constitute the terms of a discourse on the artist, on art as method, reiteration, and practice, and, in essence, the terms of a discourse on avant-gardism. According to the anthropologist Jean Laude, a generalised attention for the body, and for its being a source of “ritualized and equilibrated movement,” was diffused among nineteenth-century artists around 1870, and expressed in the proliferation of such themes as the virtuoso exercises performed by circus acrobats, ballet dancers, and in horse racing. This brings us immediately to Degas’s concern with space, movement, and appropriation of space by means of movement. The body, wrote Laude, is then no longer the receptacle of the soul, whose inclinations and special psychology it expresses, but tends to become a tool perfectly adapted to its functions: the extreme point of this conception is found in the work of Léger, in which the body becomes the equivalent of a machine.38

Degas’s laundresses, ironers, bathers, horses, singers, and acrobats, constitute a world of bodies in action, even disturbingly life-like bodies, as in the case of the Little Dancer of Fourteen Years that in 1881 struck observers with the power of a never-seen-before ethnographic object. In Degas’s world, chance movements are banned, and action has been broken up, and reconstructed in an inventory of poses: “Mallarmé dit que la danseuse n’est pas une femme qui danse, car ce n’est point une femme et elle ne danse pas,” as in Valéry’s words, or in Gauguin’s remark that “Degas’s ballerinas are not women. They are machines in motion with graceful and prodigiously well-balanced lines.”39 Degas presents his figures in untenable positions. As we can see from his painted or sculpted figures, and as his model Alice Michel recalled, Degas demanded from his

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models, and as themes of his art, arduous poses “of disequilibrium as if they were humanly possible.”40 After having reduced life to art in such a way, Degas brought the art back to life again, by having his wax figures rise to movement. Sickert remembered Degas once projecting Grand Arabesque and turning “the statuette round slowly to show me the successive silhouettes thrown on a white sheet by the light of a candle.”41 In his sculpture, Degas mixed wax and clay, added cork, paper, metal armatures, or stuck paintbrushes in the statuettes to support them. On the exterior, he used coloured paint, cloth, and hair. Initiated by the Egyptians, wax modelling aims at the most convincing life-likeness by using wax, colours, and various materials, a tradition in which Degas worked in the manner of Poussin, who dressed his wax figures and moved them across a stage to try out the perspective, composition, and lightning of a scene.42 Degas’s wax statuettes were conceived in the same spirit: not as autonomous artworks, but as a theatre, a reconstitution of the world, where these figures would stand and pose for Degas: again, as a transgression of the spaces of art and life. Degas’s Fourteen Year Old Ballerina gives the best example of such transgression. For the only sculpture Degas ever meant to show, as he did, in 1881 at the sixth Impressionist exhibition, he used real hair, a gauze tutu, and a satin ribbon. In some statuettes of horses and jockeys, he dressed the jockey in a waistcoat. Degas’s entire creation rests on this synthesis of real and symbolic, of art and life. As he told the journalist François Thiebault-Sisson, “I made figures of animals and figures in wax to give my paintings greater expressiveness, intensity and vitality.”43 In his statuettes, drawings and paintings, Degas emphasises not so much movement as the precise gesture, the sign of the professional execution, a gesture that exists within an economy of form, function and need. What are the implications of these creatures by way of which emphasis is put on gesture? Why did Degas paint the exact, purposeful gesture all his life? Because the exact gesture constitutes technique: in the world as Degas recreates it, as Valéry wrote in Degas Danse Dessin, “art is the result of a series of operations.”44 Methodical work, in which mastery and memory have substituted imagination, produces articles, as Degas used to call his own artworks: not just products of the artist’s genius, but wares to be made, and sold. The repugnance for subjectivism and self-complacency with which these articles are imbued takes us immediately to Degas’s avant-gardism: in art making, the re-enacted memory of past works substitutes creation; experimentalism by concentration on materials, and processes, prevails over choice of subject and composition. Finally, as we will see, avant-gardism in Degas was a retreat from life into art, from sensual life and emotional involvement into

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the theatrical and the symbolic, into the practice of art. Degas’s bodies in arrested movement, bending and rising, have an intense symbolic value. By insisting precisely on the moment of effort, and on a mechanical choreography, the artist grasps the greater truth of animated movement: Degas gives his perspective on the avant-garde artist’s condition, on the heroic struggle to express, on the act of creation. The body/machine is a metaphor for art making itself, which is for Degas both an act of memory and reiteration, where his quoting of the Old Masters usefully replaces the uses of imagination, and practice as bodily performance, because painters and sculptors work with their body (like singers, ballerinas, ironers, laundresses, horses, circus acrobats). In nineteenth-century French literary circles, furthermore, ballerinas and horses were believed to share a common nature, trained, as they were, to perform a movement that “was essentially the same.”45 Duret wrote: “race-horses are in the animal world what the danseuses are in the human, being trained for a special purpose, and full of movement and graceful energy.”46 From Balzac, this topos had been passed on to Baudelaire, and to the avant-garde. Valéry confirms that Degas made no difference between the movement of the woman and that of the animal: Le Cheval marche sur les pointes. Quatre ongles le portent. Nul animal ne tient de la première danseuse, de l’étoile du corps de ballet, comme un pursang en parfait équilibre, que la main de celui qui le monte semble tenir suspendu et qui s’avance au petit pas en plein soleil. Degas l’a peint d’un vers: il dit de lui: « Tout nerveusement nu dans sa robe de soie » dans un sonnet fort bien fait où il s’est évertué à concentrer tous les aspects et fonctions du cheval de course: entraînement, vitesse, paris et fraudes, beauté, élégance suprême.47

The ballerina and the horse are the artist and his training, the effort to learn and master technical procedure within a dream of sobriety and chastity of life, all that denotes serious artistic engagement. Degas’s life-long engagement with the Old Masters, and with the technical aspects of art. makes of his entire oeuvre an enactment of Balzac’s lesson: art must be method, work, will, and chastity, “une étrange hygiène littéraire,” or to use Graham Robb’s words, a “régime de trappiste.”48 Balzac passed on this lesson to his contemporaries in a conversation with Gautier, who in turn passed it in person to Baudelaire: Nous causâmes ensuite de l’hygiène, des ménagements que l’homme de lettres doit à son corps et de sa sobriété obligée. Bien que pour illustrer la matière il ait tiré, je crois, quelques comparaisons de la vie des danseuses et des chevaux de course, la méthode dont il traita son thème (de la

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sobriété, comme preuve du respect dû à l’art et aux facultés poétiques) me fit penser à ce que disent les livres de piété sur la nécessité de respecter notre corps comme temple de Dieu.49

Dancers, then, and racing horses are a Balzacian topos constituting the terms of a discourse on the avant-garde artist, and on art as practice, method, and unhindered engagement with work. In order to live up to this ideal, all his life Degas shunned the domesticity of marriage. This was a frequent choice for artists in nineteenth-century France.50 But it was a choice that Degas had to negotiate periodically. At some point Degas considered the idea of marriage, as he wrote to his friend Henri Rouart from New Orleans in December 1872, in view of his return to Paris: You see, my dear friend, I dash home and I commence an ordered life, more so than anyone excepting Bouguereau, whose energy and make up I do not hope to equal. I am thirsting for order. — I do not even regard a good woman as the enemy of this new method of existence. — A few children for me of my own, is that excessive too? No. I am dreaming of something well done, a whole, well organized (style Poussin) and Corot’s old age. It is the right moment, just right. If not, the same order of living, but less cheerful, less respectable and filled with regrets.51

Degas considered the possibility of what he called a respectable existence predicated on bourgeois marriage. But then he never married, and we do not know that he ever had any sentimental relationships, so his story becomes that of a statement, whose two key points were monkish habits and devotion to art, but not a life devoid of sex. Degas was happy with going to the brothel, just like his friends, and most average male Parisian bourgeois.52 Degas’s approach to bachelorhood has often been taken to be a sign of his suffering spirit, of his misogyny and snobbism, or of his internalisation of patriarchal attitudes, and this, in art history and criticism, is often associated to considerations of Degas’s representations of women at work or at leisure.53 But Degas’s subjection to a personalised regimen was intentional: concerns about sex, health, and food, were for Degas, as well as for other artists, closely connected dimensions of the hygiène de l’artiste.

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Notes 1

See Guérin, 1923; Jamot, 1924; Loyrette, 1991, p. 217; Loyrette, “Portraits and Figures,” in Tinterow and Loyrette, 1994, pp. 183-231. 2 See Lemoisne, 1946, vol. II, p. 98. 3 See Certeau, 1984, p. 96. 4 Richard Rodger, “Theory, Practice and European Urban History,” in Rodger, ed., 1993, pp. 1-18. 5 Chesneau, 1874. 6 Le Petit Robert, 2002, entry ‘artiste’: “1. Personne qui pratiquait un métier, une technique difficile. 2. Personne qui se voue à l’expression du beau, pratique les beaux-arts, l’art. 3. Créateur d’une œuvre d’art, spécialement d’une oeuvre plastique. 4. Personne qui interprète une œuvre musicale ou théâtrale. 5 Fantaisiste.”: p. 150. 7 Fantin-Latour in particular was the friend of many avant-garde musicians, such Edmond Maître, Otto Scholderer, Antoine Lascoux, and Chabrier, among others, whom Degas also knew. Fantin-Latour had been interested in German music, Wagner above all, at least since the latter’s arrival in Paris in 1860 and 1861, and painted scenes taken from Wagner’s operas. In 1876 he would go to Bayreuth. See Bajou, 1990 and Delage, 1996. 8 See Banks, 1977. 9 Dr Louis La Caze (1798-1869) was a painter (his master had been Girodet), a collector, a friend of the Louvre curator Frédéric Reiset, and sometimes a member of the Paris Salon Jury. In his lifetime, La Caze was known as a specialist of Spanish painting, who owned works by Jusepe de Ribera such as Le Pied-Bot. His advice was sought by the Fine Arts administration in regard to acquisitions in this field. His suggestion to acquire Murillo’s Immaculate Conception was not followed and the painting then went to Madrid, where it hangs in the Prado, but in 1862 La Caze contributed to the acquisition of the Portrait of Philip IV by Velàzquez, which Manet engraved. Among the art critics who were interested in the paintings of the Northern schools represented in the La Caze collection were Thoré and Philippe Burty. In 1867, Thoré had mentioned the private gallery in an article written for the Paris. Guide par les principaux artistes et écrivains de la France, illustrated by an engraving d’après Hédouin of Antoine Watteau’s Gilles, which belonged to La Caze. Philippe Burty studied the works of the collection for his Catalogue des tableaux et dessins de l’Ecole française principalement du XVIIIeme siècle tirés de collections d’amateurs, published in 1860. The Goncourt brothers often mentioned La Caze in their journal. With his will compiled in 1865, La Caze left to the Musée Impérial du Louvre one of the most important donations in the history of the museum. For decades, La Caze’s private collection had been available to the interested public on Sunday afternoons, at his Left-Bank house where museum curators, critics, writers, and connoisseurs went to study it. In 1862, Nieuwerkerke, Director of Fine Arts, visited it, and his mistress, Princess Mathilde, copied from a few paintings. Edgar Degas often called in at Dr La Caze’s with his father, during his years at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Part of La

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Caze’s collection had also been displayed, in 1860, at an exhibition of French painting held at the Société Nationale des Beaux, at Louis Martinet’s gallery, on the boulevard des Italiens. 10 The 275 works exhibited in the Salle La Caze would stay in Paris. In 1872 the remaining works would be distributed to French provincial museums, as it was to La Caze’s wish: see Faroult, 2007, pp. 330-31 and Béguin, 1969. Also see Doesschate-Chu, 1975. 11 See Kahane and Wild, 1983. 12 See Monneret, 1978-79, I, pp. 126-27 and Delage, 1996. 13 Chabrier had already authored one opera and two operettas, with librettos by Paul Verlaine. Only in 1880 Chabrier would be able to leave his post at the Ministry of the Interior, to dedicate himself entirely to music: see Simougnac, 1980. 14 Loyrette, 1991, p. 67. 15 See Degas, 1947, p. 71. 16 Baudelaire, “ Salon de 1846,” in Baudelaire, 1954, pp. 605-80. 17 See Robb, 1988 for a study of the relationship between Baudelaire and Balzac. 18 In his Salon de 1846, Baudelaire addressed Balzac with an explicit reference to self-fashioning, defining the novelist as the most heroic among the novelist’s own heroes, the creatures of his novels, that is: “Car les héros de l’Iliade ne vont qu’à votre cheville, ô Vautrin, ô Rastignac, ô Birotteau,-et vous, ô Fontanarès, qui n’avez pas osé raconteur au public vos douleurs sous le frac funèbre et convulsionné que nous indossons tous-et vous, ô Honoré de Balzac, vous le plus héroïque, le plus singulier, le plus romantique et le plus poétique parmi tous les personnages que vous avez tirés de votre sein.”: Baudelaire, 1954, pp. 605-80. 19 See Notebook 21, in Reff, 1976b, I, pp. 107-10. 20 See Czestokowski and Pingeot, 2002. 21 Loyrette argues that, although the precise details of the relationship between Degas and Fiocre are unknown, it is not impossible that she posed for Degas in 1867: see Loyrette, “Degas à l’Opéra”, in Degas Inédit, 1989, pp. 47-63. Kendall has added to this account, by observing that a few of the drawings for the painting show Fiocre naked, and he presumes that these nudes were studied from a hired model: see Kendall, 1997, p. 4. 22 See Degas’s sketches in Notebooks 20, in Reff, 1976b, I, pp. 106-7 and Notebook 21, in Reff, 1976b, I, pp. 107-10. 23 As Loyrette noted, Degas’s interest in theatre and opera in the 1870s is not as well documented as it is for the years 185-92. Until 1873 Degas went occasionally to the Opéra in the rue Le Peletier, and from 1875 he went to the new Opéra Garnier. 24 See Notebook 24 in Reff, 1976b, I, pp. 119-21. 25 See Distel, 1981 and Degas, 1988, pp. 171-73. 26 See Chesneau in Berson and Goncourt, 1954. 27 See Berger jr, 2007, pp. 39-43 and my discussion of Degas’s Northern-ness. 28 Ludovic Halévy had married in 1868 Louise Breguet, a long-time family friend of the Degas sisters, through whom the artist and the playwright came to be great

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friends, until the Dreyfus Affair. Around 1861, when he was still a civil servant at the Ministry for Algeria, Halévy had been introduced to the Count de Morny, the President of the Corps Législatif, who wrote operettas and vaudevilles under the nom de plume of M. de Saint-Rémy. Morny wished to collaborate with Halévy, also a playwright, at theatrical works. Halévy became a friend and protégé of Morny and until the latter’s death in 1865, worked for him as an editor of the reports of the sessions of the Corps Législatifs for Le Moniteur: Boulenger, 1925, pp. 190-94. 29 Degas, 1947, p. 66. 30 As we know from his correspondence, Degas became a subscriber of the Paris Opera in the autumn of 1882, sharing a subscription for three days a week with Jacques-Emile Blanche. Degas reserved for himself the Wednesday and Friday nights, leaving the Mondays for Blanche. In 1885 he obtained the right of free entry to the Opera, which he frequented assiduously until 1892, as Loyrette has shown. At this point, when Degas was finally able to enter this world he had been painting for decades, the foyer de la danse was no longer that of the “grande époque (1820-1880), even though the social mix was the same as at the time of the Second Empire: aristocrats of the Ancien Régime, members of the Jockey, Empire nobility, Parisian high bourgeois (Bocher, Delamarre, Hallez, Claparède), survivors of the imperial society, Jewish high society, journalists, politicians” and a few of Degas’s acquaintances, among whom Albert Boulanger-Cavé, the collectors Henri and Albert Hecht, the art dealer Hector Brame, Ludovic Lepic, Ludovic Halévy, Forain, Isaac de Camondo, Alphonse Chéramy, Antonin Proust, Charles Ephrussi, Zacharie Zacharian, and Jules Clarétie. Degas was no longer interested, though, in frequenting the premises. His musical tastes were not up-todate, notes Loyrette. By now he despised Wagner, loved Mozart and, above all, the “grand opéra français,” now old-fashioned. The times had changed, the repertoire had changed, and old age determined his progressive desertion of the opera, which he had once so loved for “its conventions, sometimes ridiculous, and its antiquated rituals.” In the 1890s, Degas rarely mentioned the Opera in his correspondence, by that time he was living on memories, and placing his singers and dancers in undistinguishable sets: “on a donc en rêve la mémoire,” Degas wrote: see Loyrette in Degas Inédit, pp. 47-63. 31 Buci-Glucksmann, 2013. 32 For Dutch painting and pearls, Anthony Bailey has written on Vermeer that he liked “painting pearls, using various techniques. In the mid-1660s he counterfeited their likeness with two layers of paint…”, and see Bailey’s beautiful examination of The Girl with the Pearl Earring, featuring a large artificial pearl, like Van Dyck’s pearl in his Portrait of Maria Ruten: in Bailey, 2001, pp. 123-24, drawing on Wheelock, 1995. 33 See Pickvance, 1963. 34 For this dancer a Mademoiselle Hugues had posed to Degas in his studio, resulting in two drawings executed with pencil and essence on sheets of coloured paper.

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See Smith, 1829 and see Banks, 1977 for the topic of French Rococo art as incorporating both Dutch and Flemish influences. The nineteenth century rediscovered the French eighteenth century and had its own Second-Empire neobaroque. Around 1845, among the journalists of L’Artiste who called themselves the Bohème Galante were Champfleury. Banville, Houssaye, Gautier, Gozlan, Janin, Hédouin. Champfleury studied Watteau and Hédouin tried to establish a catalogue of Watteau’s oeuvre. In 1854 Charles Blanc published Les Peintres des Fêtes Galantes. But the essential critical work on the French eighteenth century must be credited to L’Art du XVIIIe siècle of the Goncourt brothers. In poetry, Paul Verlaine’s Les Fêtes Galantes are of 1869. 36 Degas, 1988, pp. 225-27. 37 Valéry, 1965, p. 33. 38 Laude, 1953. 39 Valéry, 1965, p. 33 and Gauguin, Avant et après (1903), in Gauguin, 1978, pp. 229-84, quotation at p. 259. 40 Michel, 1919 and Millard, 1976, p. 104. 41 Sickert, 1923. 42 See Sandrart’s life of Poussin in Bellori, Félibien, Passeri, and Sandrart, 1994. 43 Thiebault-Sisson. The Degas bronzes that we see in art galleries all over the world do not have the voodoo feel of the original small waxes, of which 69 are extant of the 150 circa found crumbling in Degas’s studio by Durand-Ruel at the death of the painter in September 1917. The bronzes were cast in hundreds after Degas’s death, following the wish of his heirs, and not his own. Degas himself never cast a work in bronze as he thought that “leaving behind a work in bronze was too great a responsibility.” 44 Valéry, 1965, p. 13. 45 Millard, 1976, p. 86. 46 Duret, 1894. 47 Valéry, 1965, p. 87. 48 Robb, 1988, pp. 50-1. 49 Baudelaire, 1954, pp. 675-700. 50 Degas’s private life would not be very different from that of Moreau, who, as Mary Cullinane has written, “did not marry, and like many of his contemporaries he believed that “marriage stifles the artist.” However, the female figure, which took such a background role in his private life, “dominates Moreau’s painting.”: Cullinane, 2001. 51 Degas, 1947, pp. 24-8. 52 Loyrette, 1991, pp. 353-57. 53 This is not an exclusively feminist view of Degas. In a recent psychoanalytical study, Degas’s supposedly sexless life, sourness of moods, self-criticism, and hypochondria are seen as “symptoms of self-disorder, in which a split-off grandiosity (linked to the loving but lost mother) and a damaged self are precariously maintained. Wholeness and vitality are tenuous. There is instability in mood, uncertain self-esteem and a defensive avoidance of close contact with others.”: Hagman, 2010, p. 43.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE BODY OF THE ARTIST

1. The Abelardian Ideal Hygiene means, and meant for Degas, “the regimen of health”: “what we did (and do) for ourselves in order to preserve our bodies, with or without trained doctors, or publicly provided facilities.” In its ancient Greek sense, hygiene means “wholesomeness and human healthiness,” a philosophy of life presided over by the goddess Hygieia. By 400 BCE, hygiene had emerged “as a specialized medical discipline that attempted to control every aspect of the human environment-air, diet, sleep, work, exercise, the evacuations, passions of the mind-and to incorporate them into a sanitary or wholesome way of life.”1 Perhaps more consistently than others, Degas embraced artistic existence both hygienically, in the holistic sense delineated above, and according to an ideal that has been defined as Abelardian. As described by Eric Walter, the Abelard complex refers to the celibacy of the modern intellectual, which is both a philosophical position of control of the sensual life of the body and the embodiment of a subversive social message. The question of the celibacy of the intellectual entered official discourse around 1780, “dans les marges de la littérature libertine.”2 The first modern Abelardian intellectual was Grimod de la Reynière, a “célibataire gourmand” who made of the love of eating the passion of his life. 3 In his Réflexions philosophiques sur le plaisir par un célibataire (1783) and in Lorgnette philosophique (1795), Grimod invoked the “substitution à l’objet sexuel de l’objet alimentaire,” thereby forging a new figure of “intellectuel célibataire,” one who claimed the right to celibacy for a limited number of “gens vertueux que l’amour des Lettres, le goût de la retraite et l’étude de la Philosophie retiennent dans la solitude, éloignent du grand Monde et rendent incapables des embarras du Ménage et des devoirs qu’exige l’état du Mariage.” 4 Grimod de la Reynière‘s was a “geste fondateur.” 5 The appropriation of the right to celibacy from the Church, and the

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proclamation of the celibate state as inherent to the literary vocation, inaugurated the marginal figure that would haunt the sexual and social imagination of the nineteenth century: “le poète-moine, l’ascète-reclus en littérature, le génie névrosé, l’écrivain onaniste ou homosexuel.”6 Both the Abelardian intellectual and its exact opposite, the Sadean intellectual, or libertine, subverted moral and social expectations by refusing sentimental relationships, marriage, and procreation. Embodiments of counter-cultural modernity, they sabotaged the Enlightenment’s ideal of family and social order such as became dominant in nineteenth-century France. The Enlightenment, critical of arranged marriages, had brought about a new model of relations between husband and wife: as a private and free relationship between two individuals, marriage should be based on love, sentimental and erotic, and companionship. This also entailed the diffusion of a social and cultural ideal of the family as the site of edification of natural moral affections, such as parenthood. The nurturing bourgeois family triumphed over the Ancien Régime model of family as a “miniature monarchy, with the husband king over his dependents,” an instance of absolutism that the philosophes challenged. 7 The Enlightenment had brought a representation of the family as the site for the legitimisation of both sexual marital pleasure and pleasures associated with femininity and sexuality, such as nutrition, a construct that provided the ground for the individual and communitarian identity of the ideal republican Frenchman in the nineteenth century, and for its implied attack on celibacy, both libertine and religious, as contrary to modern society. But there existed an avant-garde of artistes célibataires, such as Degas, Flaubert, or the Goncourt brothers: Abelardian intellectuals unwilling to conform to the dominant social and moral values associated with marriage and its assigned masculine roles, and for whom the relationship with womanhood was necessarily envisioned outside a “conjugalité inconceivable ou invivable.”8 As we have seen, Degas chose a bachelor life, refusing a view dominant in nineteenth-century French liberal bourgeois society, and that concerned itself with the country’s degeneration. This view promoted a medical discourse which legitimised at all levels, philosophical, scientific, moral, clinical, public and private, bourgeois marriage as the site for natural love, sexual pleasure, and reproduction, and an attendant discourse on hygiene preaching both cleanliness, physical and moral, and moderation in all aspects of lifestyle. This view also condemned excessive or deviant sexual activity, including continence, as threats to the nervous system that could affect the virility and reproductive function of men, as

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well as lead to madness. Degas refused marriage, the sanctified and advised corrective for every deviant sexual behaviour or identity, and the protection of the generative ability of the country, as promoted by a discourse going hand in hand with the Republican political project of the Enlightenment. In her 2008 study of the lives of Camille Doncieux, Hortense Fiquet, and Rose Beuret, the model-wives of, respectively, Monet, Cézanne, and Auguste Rodin, Ruth Butler has observed the peculiar situation presented by late-nineteenth-century artistic culture: the artists of the Realist-Impressionist avant-garde were the first generation “in which a large number of artists identified their chosen model and their chosen woman as one and the same.”9 The emergence of the model-wife coincides with “the growing interest artists had in scenes of everyday life, in both the city and the country, in preference to subjects drawn from mythology, historical events, and the Bible.”10 This shift brought about the frequent preference, on the part of the artists, for models “who had never posed at all, but who had a unique look or an inherent body language of particular interest to a painter or a sculptor,” over models who posed conventionally and/or professionally.11 These Realist-Impressionist artists and their models/wives seem to have materialised Zola’s advocacy of marriage as a desirable arrangement for the modern artist, one reconciling the artistic ideal of an ordered and productive lifestyle with the nationalistic call to contribute to the country’s growth and greatness. Zola was “intensely pro-marriage,” and probably influenced Cézanne’s sudden idea of marrying Hortense Fiquet, his partner of many years, and mother of his son, just as the writer was lending his alter ego Sandoz, in L’Oeuvre, a piece of advice for the painter Lantier: that marriage was, for a painter, an essential condition for the production of “good, solid, regular work.” Degas, we have seen, took instead the view expressed by Alphonse Daudet in Femmes d’artistes (1874), that a marriage contract could give women the idea that they had the right to be demanding, leading the man into a life he might not want, or become overbearing, and frustrate his creative life. 12 Degas’s aversion to marriage was not founded on misogyny, but was grounded in contempt for systems of power and public life that forced on men, as much as on women, normative ideals of manhood and womanhood. But above all, it was a consideration of the nature of marriage in French society, and of the predominant role assigned to women in domestic life, that played a part in Degas’s rejection of married life. 13 Not coincidental, for an artist determined to pursue his vocation exclusively and freely, was Degas’s attitude towards his home interiors,

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which he intended as both a living and a working space. Degas took so seriously the matter of the aesthetics of his artist’s interiors that it developed over the years into a truly territorial/curatorial embrace of the uniqueness of his working and living space as the expression of his artistic existence.14 Degas’s choice not to marry is no critical justification for the normalisation of his reputation as a misogynist in the literature. In choosing bachelorhood, and a life centred on urban sociability, rather than on the family, Degas adopted a lifestyle that nineteenth-century French society generally regarded as a threat and as an element of social disorder, for avoiding marriage and procreation, which were deemed essential to a notion of public good founded on bourgeois morals. But more than just not complying with these normative ideals, Degas’s concern with regulating his own body and preserving its health translated vitalist and holistic attitudes of the time that Vincent van Gogh understood well: as this last wrote, “good food, healthy living, not taking much notice of women is the secret of the artist, and Degas is doing just that, and successfully, too.”15 Furthering his observation that Degas assigned an irrelevant role to sex and women, Van Gogh remarked that Degas chose good food and healthy living, “like a petty lawyer who doesn’t like women knowing very well that if he did like them and bedded them frequently, he’d go to seed and be in no position to paint.” 16 More than claiming for himself an antibourgeois conduct in his rejection of marriage, and the dominant nurturing familial ideal, Degas embraced the Abelardian existence in a manner that was perfectly in context with a counter-cultural concern for bodily practices of purity and cleanliness which spread within intellectual and artistic circles in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. For Van Gogh, the standard set by Degas’s controlled attitude to sex, food, and the body in general, distinguished the seriously engaged few who, in avantgarde circles, pursued as artists the hygienic life, from those who didn’t care to, or, like himself, who couldn’t quite get themselves to live the hygienic life 17 In nineteenth-century artistic debates, individuality, or genius, personhood, and body of the artist were aspects of a single issue grounded in a system of intersecting philosophical and medical discourses about the body. And yet, the issue of how modern artists constructed the tensions between mind, body, and social existence in relation to the body has been relatively neglected. On the one hand, the focus has been on the mind of the artist, on the centrality of the Vasarian concept of genius, both as a topos of nineteenth-century art historiography, and as a selffashioning tool for artists.18 On the other hand, it has been emphasised that

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the nineteenth-century Romantic theory of genius, rooted in ancient humoural theories, was characterised by a rhetoric of female inferiority and sexual exclusion, and by a tradition of cultural misogyny that “remained (and even intensified) despite a reversal in attitudes towards emotionality, sensitivity and imaginative self-expression,” all feminine inclinations that were downgraded but appropriated to serve ideas of Romantic creativity.19 This view cannot be ignored, though it fails to take sufficient account of the nineteenth-century concept that genius was neither simply male nor a permanent and fixed quality. It was above all physiological, it was a vital force that inhabited the body and that could, or must be governed through the care due to one’s own body as receptacle of vital creative force. As Georges Vigarello has pointed out in his history of hygiene, at the end of the eighteenth century, cleanliness no longer concerned, as in aristocratic culture, the immediate appearance of the body and the visible dry skin, but the strength of the body, its organic and secret forces, which must be vivified, unchained, cultivated through hygienic practices such as the cold bath.20 The idealization of the cold bath was a political instrument for the bourgeois proclamation of a totally new image of the body, inhabited by a vital “internal force.”21 The shift was social and political: the bourgeois body, the body of the modern citoyen, had autonomous physical strength, existing and functioning for itself, and worthy of special medical attention: it was a body manageable through hygiene, and no longer for “esthétique et civilité,” but for functionality.22 The subject of a functional body as the seat of the artist’s genius and originality was the subject of much comment among artists, as we know from Van Gogh. Writing to his brother Theo in Paris in February 1886, Van Gogh announced that he wanted to leave the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts, go to Paris, and enrol as a student with Cormon. But there was a lot he had to do to improve his health before he could move there: “we must try to do things energetically,” he declared, because, as he had heard from fellow painters working in Paris, “they work for four hours in the morning at Cormon’s, then in the evening one can go and work at the Louvre or at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts or some other studio where drawing is done.”23 A healthy, energetic body constituted the framework for attaining the knowledge of nature that was the essence of Realist/Naturalist art. According to nineteenth-century theories of art, the originality of the true artist was grounded in the knowledge of nature. In his 1865 lectures taken at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Hyppolite Taine proclaimed that art aimed not to mere mimesis (“imiter l’apparence

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sensible”) but to grasp “les rapports des parties.” The aim of the modern artist was to grasp the relationships linking the parts together, “pour y faire dominer un caractère essentiel.”24 This object of art the artist grasped in its essential character through the peculiar experience that made the artist an artist. Taine called it the “sensation originale”: qu’on le décore de beaux noms, qu’on l’appelle inspiration, génie, on fait bien et on a raison; mais si on veut le définir avec precision, il faut toujours y constater la vive sensation spontanée qui groupe autour de soi le cortège des idées accessoires, les remanie, les façonne, les métamorphose et s’en sert pour se manifester.25

Taine and Van Gogh were clear about it: the modern artist needed a healthy body to bring about that original sensation which was the element of genius and inspiration in the acquisition of the knowledge and mastery of nature in which, in turn, was grounded the originality of the true artist, according to nineteenth-century theories of art. To study drawing effectively, one had to work energetically: “More and more I believe that l’art pour l’art, to work for work’s sake, l’énergie pour l’énergie, is after all the principle of all great artists.”26 The aim, however, was not “drawing in itself, the technique of it,” but to go past the satisfaction “with the skill gradually acquired,” and aim “seriously and thoroughly at originality and broadness of conception-the drawing of the mass instead of the outlines, the solid modeling.”27 Van Gogh knew that “if one wants to paint pictures, one must try and stay alive and keep one’s strength.”28 Yet, he conceded, one must not think that people whose health is impaired, wholly or partly, are no good for painting. It is necessary to reach the sixties, or at least the fifties, if one begins at thirties. But one need not be perfectly healthy, one may have all kinds of ailments. The work need not suffer from it. On the contrary, nervous people are more sensitive and refined.29

On the one hand, Vincent longed to belong to the “aristocratie intellectuelle,” as the Goncourt brothers had defined it, who “perceived the neurasthenic state as the ground of existence for the modern artist,” defining themselves “as aristocrats of the spirit precisely because of the extreme refinement of the nerves.”30 On the other hand, Van Gogh feared the pathology associated with neurasthenia: “What I do not like is that I am feverish” and weak, he wrote, hoping that his health redress itself because, after all, he had been taking a “great deal of fresh air”, and had been careful “not to take unwholesome food,” eating “very simple food

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instead of the rotten things in the cheap restaurants.”31 Van Gogh knew that artists “shall need a long life, at least twenty five or thirty years of incessant work,” but he struggled to improve his health and what his doctor called his “physical way of living.”32 In this respect Degas was for Van Gogh a model of the artist who managed successfully the tension between mind and body. This was an issue that nineteenth-century artistic culture elaborated and commented upon because it was of concern to artists in relation to their “actual practice as professionals,” in light of the consideration that artists, as well as writers, scientists, and sociologists, “engage in public life as professionals,” and “they proclaim the continuity between their commitment and their conception of their work.”33 Taine’s aesthetic theory stressed the permanence of the body, both as the corporeal metaphor central to French political discourse, and as the philosophical and medical concept attending to theories of personhood and individuality, and therefore, to theories of genius and creativity. For the first aspect, at the heart of French revolutionary and republican politics is the “enigma” of the corporeal metaphor: that is, Sieyès’s “use of the organicist metaphor: the political system as vision of a human body,” existing alongside the mechanistic metaphor, intended as the vision of society as a machine in which the separate parts exist individually, but work in harmony. For the second aspect, Taine’s reflection linked the debate on genius, as individual and original creator, to philosophical and medical conceptions of the body that were specific to modern French revolutionary political discourse on subjectivity and personhood. The body of the modern artist was a repository of vital energy, sensation, creativity, and imagination, and therefore the very ground for the artist’s own response to nature: qualities of genius, as well as vital principles in themselves. More than being just the seat of the artist’s creative power, the body of the Realist/Naturalist artist was understood as a modern type of body, claiming a specific epistemology, a specific self-consciousness, and a specific “mode of knowing nature,” and imitating it through the body and the senses.34 The bourgeois nineteenth century had brought about a vitalist vision of the body, and an attendant idea of hygiene as necessary to preserve health, and the new order of things. Medical men and hygienists stressed that excess and over-excitement, through immoderate and habitual sensual stimulation, could affect the nervous system and, on the balance of the “sensibilité «nerveuse»,” could tip over on the side of madness. For C. F. Hufeland’s La Macrobiotique ou l’art de prolonger la vie de l’homme,

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strong emotions, passions, fatigue, and excessive sensibility, could affect the nerves/fibres, and the organs of the body, albeit differently in each individual, who is exhorted to know himself and his weaknesses. Nervous fragility now explained illness. Excessive sexual and nervous tensions in general were regarded as dangerous. Around 1864, the thermodynamic theme of the necessity of a careful control of the expense of body energy, which should not be unreasonably wasted, was prominent, and sexual excess was the object of precepts and recommendations from which no one was exempt.35

2. “Good food, healthy living…” As Van Gogh noted, Degas’s attitude to food and health was also regulated by the demands of the bachelor artist’s existence. Degas was concerned by what he ate and by his health, much like Pissarro, who, as is well known, followed homeopathy.36 As contemporaries saw him, Degas’s holistic approach to health and to body control extended to food. In this respect, too, his attitude denoted contempt for bourgeois existence. In nineteenth-century France, gastronomy and cookery, on a par with the arts and the sciences, became part of the official intellectual discourse, committed to a “triple propos: instruire, séduire, légiférer,” according to an ideological “projet pédagogique et normatif” which saw the French take the lead in the world of taste. Gastronomy entered cultural discourse at all levels of French society. 37 As Jean-Paul Aron has written, it became a “valeur de prestige de la bourgeoisie,” and a sign “de sa promotion sociale.”38 Gastronomy and cuisine were also claimed by the lower social classes, “non seulement comme la manifestation d’un besoin vital, mais comme symbole de sa valorisation.”39 Nineteenth-century French cuisine became grounded in the sauce-making function of providing the harmonising and mediating principle in the balance of the dish.40 Degas, however, was not taken by this new “mythologie alimentaire,” fuelled, in Aron’s words, “par les images euphoriques et respectables de la fortune bourgeoise.”41 Established in power, the bourgeoisie was, in fact, nostalgic for aristocratic luxury and grandeur.42 Restaurants, fine food merchants, and traiteurs abounded in Paris, where a “commerce intense” put at its centre the gourmand, “le type exemplaire du nouveau mangeur.”43 Degas set himself apart from this exemplary type. He was a fin-de-siècle antiauthoritarian, and a rebel to conventional bourgeois social values, who took the body as a site of contestation and resistance to the dominant

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philosophy of scientific positivism, international capitalism, and liberal mass politics. Valéry describes sad and tasteless dinners with the artist, who, for fear of gastro-intestinal occlusion, demanded rigorously insipid food: plain veal and overcooked macaroni, no sauce, followed by Dundee orange marmalade.44 Health fears played a part in Degas’s choice of a dull diet. As Colin Spencer writes in The Heretic’s Feast. A History of Vegetarianism (1993), the vegetarian creed has often been “one of dissidence, comprising rebels and outsiders, individuals and groups who find the society they live in to lack moral worth,” a creed for strong individualists, “often pilloried and ridiculed for what they said.” While Degas was not a vegetarian, his antics and health fears were perfectly in context in fin-de-siècle Europe, where all sorts of diets were suggested by doctors and practiced by individuals with health concerns. The model Alice Michel remembered Degas talking about the cherry tea he used to drink during the posing sessions, because, as he said, he “couldn’t piss.”45 On his doctor’s advice, Degas used to take the waters at Bagnoles de l’Orne, at the Mont Dore, or at Cauterets, not far from the healing mineral springs/miraculous fountains which dot the Pyrenees, along with pilgrimage sites, and holy shrines. Hydrotherapy was an increasingly popular cure for various ailments. At spas, or at any massage room in Montmartre, he might have had therapies for circulation, such as the Swedish flogging with branches, which appears in a page of one of his notebooks. Degas was clearly tuned in to the health and body culture of the turn of the century. Durand-Ruel’s tales that Degas, “a bohemian all his life,” ate only eggs and milk, and Vollard’s list of Degas’s idiosyncrasies, including a dislike for flowers, butter, flour-based sauces, dogs, and cats are all consistent, and, together with his characteristic sexual life, account for his obsession with purity and health. This, in turn, is consistent with another first-hand image of Degas as the Abelardian artist, who kept taking care of his own body: in the last years of his life, bodily movement became his antidote to decay and unhappiness. Degas spent hours walking, being convinced that one does not die while walking. 46 Like his friend and fellow artist Pissarro, a bohemian and anti-bourgeois Degas was perfectly in context with nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle concerns for purity and cleanliness.47 He was very close to Pissarro, who was, more famously, an anarchist, and a follower of homeopathy. Both endorsed an idea of genius as “generally available capacity” which cannot be dissociated from ideas of the body, health, and illness.

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Such ideas also pervade the Abelardian holism by which Degas contrived to live his life: an instance of fin-de-siècle philosophical and political search for wholeness, a development of philosophical traditions emphasising “creativity through awareness of kinds of ‘wholeness’ and absolute ‘being’, or of ‘non-being’ and ceaseless ‘becoming’.” 48 This “explicit theorising of ‘awareness’ and ‘circumspection’ as kinds of creative act” harks back to the German Romantics, who believed in genius as “generally available capacity,” a belief that passed to Bergson’s vitalism, Heidegger’s phenomenology, Sartre’s existentialism, and Deleuze and Guattari’s “preoccupation with kinds of ‘becoming’.”49 The common view of Degas as a staid bourgeois and misogynist bachelor therefore misses the larger story: Degas, who embraced the Abelard ideal, wanted to remain outside the control of French republican ideology, eluded its masculine and rational message, and destabilised its familycentred antifeminist project, by sabotaging the sexual-social pact at the core of the institution of marriage, and in which modern patriarchal right is grounded. Degas cannot simply be reduced to a stereotype of Right-wing narrow-mindedness. Overlooking a Paris that radiated progress, grandeur, culture, and refinement, Degas was fully at ease in libertarian Montmartre, where the co-existence of anarchist thinkers, social revolutionaries, activists, radicalised artists, ad pamphleteers, made of this “remote quarter,” as Van Gogh described it, the place of political and social counter-cultural tensions that signalled the turn of an era.50

Notes

 1

Smith, 2007, pp. 14-15. Walter, 1980, p. 127. 3 Walter, 1980, p. 129. 4 Quoted in Walter, 1980, p. 129. 5 Walter, 1980, p. 129. 6 Walter, 1980, p. 129. 7 Coontz, 2005, p. 148. 8 Walter, 1980, p. 129. 9 Butler, 2008, p. 2. 10 Butler, 2008, p. 3. 11 Butler, 2008, p. 4. 12 Butler, 2008, p. 5. 13 See on this topic: Michelle Perrot, “Figures et roles,” in Ariès and Duby, eds., 1987, vol. 4, pp. 121-85 and Anne Martin-Fugier, “Les rites de la vie privée 2

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 bourgeoise,” in Ariès and Duby, eds., 1987, vol. 4, pp. 193-261. 14 See Crisci-Richardson 2012. 15 Letter 448 in Gogh, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 479-85. 16 Letter 448 in Gogh, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 479-85. 17 For a discussion of Van Gogh’s elaborations on the painter as either monk or soldier, see Zemel, 1997. 18 See Soussloff, 2005. 19 Battersby, 1989, p. 25. 20 See Vigarello, 1985, pp. 125-26. 21 Vigarello, 1985, p. 13. 22 Vigarello, 1985, p. 154. 23 Letter 448 in Gogh, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 479-85. 24 Taine, 1865, p. 62 (italics in the original text). 25 Taine, 1865, p. 61 (italics in the original text) and p. 63. 26 Letter 448 in Gogh, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 479-85. 27

Letter 448 in Gogh, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 479-85. Letter 448 in Gogh, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 479-85. 29 Letter 449 in Gogh, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 485-87. 30 Silverman 1989, p. 37. 31 Letter 449 in Gogh, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 485-87. 32 Letter 449 in Gogh, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 485-87. 33 Gisèle Sapiro, Forms of Politicization in the Literary Field, in Swartz and Zolberg, eds., 2004, pp. 146-64. 34 As Pamela Smith has written, in the seventeenth century’s concern with ways “to obtain knowledge of nature” (Smith, 2004, p. 20), modernity has brought about an artisanal epistemology articulated both in texts and in naturalistic works of art, of direct access to nature “through bodily engagement with matter” (Smith, 2004, p. 20). Articulated through the body and the senses as organs of natural knowledge, a modern artisanal epistemology “created an identity through which practitioners could express claims to authority on the basis of their knowledge of nature” (Smith, 2004, p. 20), allying empirical philosophy and artistic naturalism. In her study Smith focuses on Northern-European naturalism, in fifteenth-century Flemish art, sixteenth-century German, and seventeenth-century Dutch art, but her theory applies well to nineteenth-century French Realism and Naturalism. Here I rely on this theory of the body of the Naturalist artist, like Degas, or Van Gogh, working throughout this chapter with the notion of the body of the Naturalist artist as a specific modern type of body. 35 Vigarello, 1985. 36 See for instance Pissarro’s comments on Manet’s critical health conditions in a letter to Lucien of March 29, 1883: “Our poor friend Manet is terribly sick. He has been completely poisoned by allopathic medicine. He has a gangrenous leg; this 28

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 condition results from having taken tremendous doses of spurred rye. We are losing a great painter and a man of charm.”: Pissarro, 1943, pp. 25-6. Also see his letter of October 23, 1893 to his daughter-in-law Esther in London: Pissarro, 1943, p. 220. 37 See on this topic: Aron, 1967, focusing on nineteenth-century “Paris alimentaire” (Aron, 1967, p.17) and the rise of a “gastronomie collective” to the status of official culture, a process exemplary of “l’instauration d’une mentalité” and its becoming an institution (Aron, 1967, p. 16). On the professionalisation of cuisine in France and on the connection between aristocratic cuisine, as practised by chefs in noble homes and its development in the public sphere of the restaurant at the French Revolution, see in particular Trubek, 2000, who explains how and why “French haute cuisine came to define the practice of the modern culinary profession and the discourse on fine food” (Trubek, 2000, p. 128). 38 Aron, 1967, p. 13. 39 Aron, 1967, p. 14. 40 On sauces as fundamental components of French haute cuisine along with stocks, knife skills, cooking methods, and pastry see Trubek, 2000, pp. 18-22, where sauces are defined as the result of a process by means of which “different ingredients are added to stocks and cooked in a number of ways” (Trubek, 2000, p. 18) to different degrees of thickness and consistency. The purpose of a sauce is to be used “to coat a piece of fish or fowl or meat” (Trubek, 2000, p. 18). 41 Aron, 1967, p. 29. 42 Aron, 1973, p. 8. 43 Aron, 1973, p. 9. 44 Valéry, 1965, pp. 50-1. 45 Michel, 1919. 46 Halevy, 1966, pp. 108-11. 47 See Smith, 2007. 48 Pope, 2005, p. 61. 49 Pope, 2005, p. 62. 50 Letter 447, in Gogh, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 477-79.

CHAPTER NINE DEGAS’S AVANT-GARDE

1. The Franco-Prussian war This chapter looks at the life and works of Degas during and after the Franco-Prussian war (July-September 1870), the siege of Paris, and the Commune (March 18-May 28 1871), and into the Third Republic. This will lead to a consideration of Degas’s art and politics, in their context of republicanism, and especially along Manet’s artistic practice and republican ideas, and, finally, of Degas’s passage to anarchism. The historian Philip Nord has described Degas’s republicanism as a transient phenomenon. As Nord has written, “the generation that spawned the new painting was the same that shepherded the new Republic. The painters and politicians involved in the two enterprises knew and to various extents admired each other.” For Nord, though, whereas Manet’s attachment to republicanism was sincere, Renoir’s was “opportunistic,” and Degas’s was “transient.”1 Despite his republicanism, and despite what we know about his avant-garde engagement, Degas’s fin-de-siècle reputation as a Right-wing, anti-Semitic, and conservative bourgeois, is so widespread in the literature that it eclipses the fact that Degas was himself, for most of his long life, as much a democrat and a republican as Manet. Because the Manets were, in every respect, a more prominent and wealthy family than the unknown Degas, sources abound about the republicanism of Manet’s family, both during the Second Empire and after, until the painter’s death in 1883. We do not know a great deal about the political orientation of the Degas family, and of the painter in particular during his youth and mature years. The prevailing image of Degas’s politics, as passed down through art history and criticism, is built on a few ideas he held during his old age, namely on his anti-Dreyfusardism, on his yearning for an old France, and on his comments on Jews and Protestants alike, whom he considered to be the cause of the nation’s decline. While Degas remains liable for these views, they cannot be attributed to him until the 1890s.2 Before then, and especially during the 1860s and 1870s, what we know of Degas is that politically his views were aligned with those of

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Manet. During the war against Prussia, and during the siege of Paris, for instance, the two engaged in the National Guards and were seen together at the same venues. Five days after the Paris Salon closed on July 14, 1870, war was declared between France and Prussia. Destined not to see Paris again, Napoleon III left for the front with his son. They would lead the army of the Rhine, stationed in Lorraine, while Marshal Mac-Mahon was at the head of the army stationed in Alsace. The inferiority of the French army, when compared to the Prussian one, led by Marshal von Moltke, was so marked that the war went immediately against the French, from the very first battle fought at Wissenbourg (August 4) until the final capitulation at Sedan (September 2). Napoleon III, on the battlefield at Sedan, surrendered his sword to the Kaiser, was taken prisoner, and sent to Wilhelmshöhe castle. At Sedan, Degas’s soon-to-be friend Ludovic Lepic was also taken prisoner. He would be released in the following spring.3 The Second Empire was suddenly over. The Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris on September 4, 1870, led by a Government of National Defence with General Trochu as President, Léon Gambetta for the Minister of Interior, and Jules Favre for Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Prussians had invaded Alsace and Lorraine, and while holding Metz and Strasbourg under siege, part of Marshal von Moltke’s army proceeded in the direction of Paris. Installed at Versailles with a German court, his intention was to take Paris by siege, knowing that the city would be able to survive it for two months only.4 The siege of Paris began on September 19. While Strasbourg fell to the Germans ten days later, the defence of the capital was in the hands of the National Guards, who were civilians manning the numbered city ramparts, closer to their neighbourhood, along the nine sections into which the city fortifications had been divided.5 The war dispersed the circle gathering at the café Guerbois. Monet, then in Trouville, left his wife and child and went to London.6 Pissarro also went to London, staying there until June 1871, with his companion Julie Vellay and their children. In London, both Monet and Pissarro tried, unsuccessfully, to exhibit at the Royal Academy annual show. Through Daubigny, Monet met the art dealer Durand-Ruel, and through him Pissarro, and other French refugee artists, who used to meet in London at the Hôtel de la Boule d’Or, in Percy Street, and at Audinet’s, in Charlotte Street. Durand-Ruel began to show their artworks at his gallery.7 Cézanne evaded conscription and went into hiding from the police in Provence; Sisley remained with his family in Louveciennes. Renoir was posted in Bordeaux and Tarbes as a cavalryman. Bazille enlisted in the Zouaves. Tissot joined the National Guard as an Eclaireur de la Seine. Berthe

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Morisot and Fantin-Latour stayed in Paris, the latter hidden in his house. Manet and Degas also stayed in Paris, and both volunteered as gunners in the infantry, as we know from Manet’s correspondence.8 Manet, having sent his family to a village in the Pyrenées, continued to live in his mother’s apartment at 49 rue de St-Pétersbourg, with his brothers and their maid. They also housed a few soldiers. Manet had to give up his studio at 81, rue Guyot, where he had worked since 1861, and for a time he used as his studio a space next door to his house, at 51 rue de St-Pétersbourg. Manet was all his life a republican. He was a long-time friend of such militant republicans as Léon Gambetta, Georges Clemenceau, and Henri de Rochefort, whom Nord has characterised as “a notorious trio of political troublemakers,” and as much “uncompromising enemies of Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire,” as of the Third Republic’s “clerical and crypto-monarchist governments of Moral Order that came to power in the mid-1870s (1873-7).”9 Despite the common republicanism, the personal commitment of the new painters to the democratic cause varied greatly, and some of them were more active than others in the defence of Paris. Manet and Degas, for instance, did not flee the war, like Monet or Pissarro, but stayed in Paris to fight. In a manner consistent with his political beliefs, during the war, after a day spent on the ramparts in the defence of Paris, Manet attended the evening meetings, held in clubs and public spaces of the town, to guide the activities of the national defence.10 Degas did the same. Manet wrote to his wife Suzanne, in a letter of 14 September 1870, that he had attended a public assembly with his brother Eugène and Degas. This was one of the many public meetings held daily throughout Paris in large halls, café-concerts, wine-shops, circuses, and theatres, converted by the Republic into spaces for public political meetings. These venues abounded, especially in Montmartre and Pigalle, the ninth arrondissement of Manet and Degas.11 On that September day of 1870, the two local painters went to the Folies-Bergère to listen to the discourse of the future Head General of the Army of the Commune, Gustave-Paul Cluseret.12 The Folies-Bergère, which had opened in May 1869, were located in the ninth arrondissement, at 32, rue Richer. This was a very large theatre hall cum café. Its peculiarity was that patrons paid a standard entry fee, and paid for their drinks, and while enjoying a play, they could come and go, drink and smoke as they pleased, just as they would in a café.13 In the winter of 1870-71, then, we find Degas and Manet at the Folies-Bergère, where citizens could listen to the speeches of Jules Michelet and Henri Rochefort.14 This fact by itself allows us to map a Parisian revolutionary and bohemian Degas, locating the artist’s entire vie de quartier at the foot of the Montmartre hill, a very “subjective

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neighbourhood.”15 The hill was not just the seedy playground of the bourgeois pleasure-seeker, but a specifically anti-bourgeois setting, full of studios, where intellectuals, avant-garde poets, musicians and artists worked and lodged, and the home of the theatrical and cabaret culture which was the breeding ground of Parisian bohemianism, Communard revolution, and fin-de-siècle anarchism, both Right- and Left-wing.16 When seen against this urban geography of oppositional and revolutionary street life, in which Degas moved all his life, a distinctive image is delineated of the artist in his countercultural montmartrois Zeitgeist. The image of a self-conscious bachelor painter of uncertain means, who frequented the cafés of the avant-garde, ate and dressed simply, and had a reputation for being philosophical, witty, and incapable of flirting with a woman, is not that of a conservative bourgeois, but that of a dandified bohemian, and an anarchist with eccentric habits. During the siege of Paris, Degas entered the National Guard. While practising with the rifle at Vincennes, the eyesight troubles from which he had suffered for years forced him to pass from the infantry into the artillery.17 A resident of the ninth arrondissement, Degas was posted at Bastion 12. While Manet served under Ernest Meissonnier, Degas served under Captain Henri Rouart, an acquaintance of his from the days of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Rouart, his brother Alexis, and Degas would be life-long friends from then on.18 As Clayson has written, in order to reach the location of his posting, Degas was obliged “to cross a broad swath of town that was new to him on his journeys back and forth to the rue de Laval.”19 We know from Henri Hertz, one of Degas’s early biographers, that the painter used to visit a field hospital near the Etoile, to bring the patients news from his part of town.20 It is possible that this was related to the activity of a committee of artists and collectors who, under the patronage of the Société de Secours aux Blessés, and with the help of the art dealer Durand-Ruel, auctioned artworks to raise money for the wounded.21 The exploration of new territory did not leave its marks on Degas’s painting, at least not in the sense that the new territory encountered by Degas translated into pictorial motifs, as it did with Manet, who painted wartime street scenes of Paris. According to Nord, both Degas’s and Manet’s “wartime patriotism never flagged in subsequent years,” but, unlike Manet’s, Degas’s patriotism was characterised by his “lifelong cult of the army,” which Nord finds to be the motivation behind one of only two works Degas executed during the war. This is the double portrait of Rabbi Aristide Astruc and General Emile Mellinet (1871), a small canvas portraying two notable personalities of Second Empire Paris, two Freemasons acquainted with one another. During the war they distinguished themselves as relief workers, “a

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humanitarian bond which Degas’s canvas was meant to commemorate,” as Nord has written.22 The quality of remoteness of the double portrait of rabbi Astruc and General Mellinet indicates that it was executed from photographs of the two men, war heroes whom Degas did not meet. Similar to Van Dyck’s portraits of heroic generals of the Thirty Years’ war, executed from prints, Degas’s canvas was a painter’s reconstruction of his personal world, a distinctive self-fashioning, often carried out in double portraits, defined above as his Iconography. The double portrait of the two Freemasons can also be read, as Nord has suggested, as a reflection of Degas’s appreciation of military discipline: he would have read in this the same discipline underlying a horse or dancer’s training, or the repetitive movements of a laundress at work. But in the case of this double portrait, we should emphasise Degas’s appreciation of the humanitarian support to the soldiers and Commune revolutionaries that Masonic lodges provided during the Commune of Paris. The war, meanwhile, went on outside the city bastions, where inconclusive battles were fought between the National Guards and the Prussians. Degas was struck by the death of a friend, the sculptor Cuvelier, while fighting the battle of the Malmaison, in which Tissot was also involved.23 That day, Degas and Manet met Tissot on his return from the battle. He showed them the sketch he had done of Cuvelier among the dead, which Degas pushed away, saying that Tissot would have done better to bring back the body of their friend.24 A few days later, on November 28, the painter Bazille was killed, at the battle of Beaune-laRolande, but the sad piece of news reached his family and friends only many weeks later. Parisians had to reckon with months of famine and with one of the coldest winters recorded in centuries. Moreover, on January 5 1871, the Prussians began shelling Paris, and three weeks later, France was forced to surrender. On January 18, Kaiser Wilhelm of Prussia crowned himself Emperor of Germany at Versailles, and German soldiers invaded the capital. The resentment generated by the catastrophic and humiliating end of the Second Empire would shape the future political life of Paris and of France.

2. The Commune Elected President of the Republic in February 1871, Adolphe Thiers began the preliminaries of the peace with the Germans that would be signed at Frankfurt in May 1871. France lost the province of Alsace and part of Lorraine, annexed to the German Empire, and had to repay war indemnities for the enormous sum of 5 billion francs-or, according to a

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Fig 9-1 Jeantaud, Linet and Lainé, March 1871, oil on canvas, cm 38 x 46, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

fixed calendar of instalments. The French would manage to pay the war indemnities before the due time, obtaining, in 1873, the anticipated evacuation of the German troops that still occupied the town of Verdun.25 But in Paris, in the winter of 1871, the frequent insurrections of starved Parisians made Thiers decide to move his government to Versailles. In Paris, the opposition to Thiers reached a peak on 18 March 1871. It all started in Montmartre, where an explosion of “semi-anarchist culture,” as Kristin Ross has aptly defined it, led to the establishment of a revolutionary republican government of workers: the Commune. According to Ross, there was no single and consistent ideology behind the Commune and its insurrections. The Communards were manual workers, artisans, and women, whose “self-definition, if not their origins, was decidedly Parisian, and their most immediate concerns had less to do with gaining control over the means of production than with avoiding eviction.”26 The Commune had no precise political programme, but it revealed the level of social unrest, and political opposition, that had grown during the so-called liberal phase of the late Second Empire (1868-70). In the late 1860s, Napoleon III had attempted to counteract the opposition by granting freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly, but this did not ease the general discontent. Wall newspapers, manifestos, pamphlets, caricatures, posters, and proclamations, licensed by a newly-found freedom of the press, announced revolution in Paris, while public assemblies, debates, and radical republican speeches took place every

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evening in ballrooms and theatres of Paris. At that point, Napoleon III revoked the right of assembly (May 1870).27 The political programme of the Commune declared, in April 1871, that the nature and reason of the revolution were to restore the responsibility of the sufferings of the nation to those who had betrayed France, and abandoned the capital city to the enemy. The Commune, it said, had the duty “d’affirmer et de déterminer les aspirations et les voeux de la population de Paris.” Paris “travaille et souffre pour la France entière,” it was stated, but the attempt to bring about a social revolution did not extend to the countryside, or even other cities of France, remaining circumscribed to Paris. Within the city walls, the Communards proclaimed Ýla fin du vieux monde gouvernemental et clérical, du militarisme, du fonctionnarisme, de l’exploitation, de l’agiotage, des monopoles, des privilèges, auxquels le prolétariat doit son servage, la Patrie ses malheurs et ses désastres.” 28 The Commune was about reclaiming Paris, and reorganising its daily life, which the Communards did by introducing such measures as the establishment of maximum salary for civil servants, and of a minimum pay for workers; the abolition of the pawnbroker; the separation of State and Church, and the laicisation of education, which was made free and compulsory for everyone. Among the other measures adopted in the Commune of Paris were the abolition of the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children, the organisation of ateliers of workers, the assignment of women to military posts, and the abolition of the night-time shift in Parisian bakeries. Libraries and museums were open to the public, after months of war, the cafés reopened, theatres and newspapers resumed their activity, while public concerts were held for the benefit of widows and orphans. A few churches became meeting points for anti-clerical clubs, as during the Great Revolution. Numerous Freemasons lodges officially supported the Commune, and in a public ceremony they paraded their flags from the Hôtel de Ville to the city ramparts. The double portrait of two Freemasons, Astruc and Mellinet, executed by Degas at this time, as discussed above, must be related to this revolutionary burst of social and political action. The city also suffered severe destruction at the hands of the Communards: the Vendôme Column was pulled down (May 16, 1871), the expiatory chapel of Louis XVI was destroyed, Thiers’s house was sacked, the Hôtel de Ville and the Tuileries burned. These were considered, and managed, by the Communards as public events, performances, and revolutionary rituals, on a par with the funerals of relevant personalities, such as generals or politicians. Courbet was politically very active with the Fédération des Artistes and would be sent

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to jail for the toppling of the Vendôme column.29 In Degas’s circle, his friend the painter Tissot, who had been involved in a few of these episodes of destruction, fled France for England, before the onset of the reactionary repression. From there he would keep a correspondence with Degas, until his return to France in 1882. This historical background is relevant to the following discussion of Degas’s political ideas and vicissitudes during the Commune, and the related issue of the implications of the artist’s republicanism in his engagement in the Impressionist ventures. The chapter will close with a discussion of Degas’s anarchist reaction to what he, and many others, perceived in the 1880-90s as the Third Republic’s betrayal of republican ideals.

3. Degas during the Commune Sometime in March 1871, Degas portrayed three of his colleagues in the National Guard: Charles Jeantaud, Pierre Linet, and Edouard Lainé, appear in a triple portrait (Fig 9-1) that Clayson has described as an “imaginary reunion of men in the framework of the return to civilian life afterward,” a reunion that “does not appear in the least staged.”30 This work appears unfinished, and only broadly sketched in certain parts, as in the motif of the hand of the man in the centre, but it is signed by Degas, and precisely dated March 1871. Charles Jeantaud, to the left, was an engineer, and to him Degas eventually gave the painting. Jeantaud sits at the table, his arms folded, with a fixed look that betrays being lost in some memory.31 Not much is known about Linet, the top-hatted figure dressed in black, and sitting comfortably in the centre, looking to the left. On the right, Edouard Lainé, also an engineer, lies in a red armchair, with a newspaper open in front of him. Clayson has read this triple portrait as a rare example of “the male bonding picture.” In her view, this is a “most fully relaxed image of male bourgeois sociability,” a “unique” painting of the “workaday wartime print of cohesive National Guardsmen,” which precedes Degas’s “postwar embrace of the theme of disconnection among sophisticated urban men” which she finds in Place de la Concorde (Viscount Lepic and His Daughters Crossing the Place de la Concorde) of 1875 (Fig 5-16) a “final bit of nostalgia for the male camaraderie on the ramparts during the siege of Paris.”32 In my reading, Degas and Lepic’s friendship has been interpreted differently, as one founded on collaboration and empathy, rather than disconnection, and Place de la Concorde has been read, accordingly, in a very different way-as seen in Chapter Five. As for Jeantaud, Linet and Lainé, it is difficult to disagree entirely with Clayson’s broad interpretation. However, this is not just a

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painting of male bonding, but has a political meaning of republican engagement in the defence of Paris that makes of Jeantaud Linet and Lainé in a literal, political, and artistic sense, a painting of the avant-garde. And like the double portrait of the two Freemasons Astruc and Mellinet, who engaged in humanitarian work during the war and the Commune, the triple portrait belongs to Degas’s reconstruction of his own world, that is, to Degas’s Iconography. The artworks mentioned above were the only ones Degas painted in wartime and revolutionary Paris, as art was suspended in the Commune. As Ross has written, there was no overlapping of art and politics in the Commune. This was so for two reasons: many artists left the city, and those who stayed devoted themselves to politics, uniting themselves in the Commission artistique pour la sauvegarde des musées nationaux. As Gonzalo Sánchez has written in his book on the Fédération des Artistes, the Commission artistique was created spontaneously in September 1870 at the quick gathering of three hundred Parisian artists. This reflected the degree of politicisation, the dissident activity, and the network of contacts within Parisian republican circles, a network sustained by the presence among, and influence over, republican artists of three relevant figures: Daumier, Courbet, and Burty, who was a friend of Degas. It was Burty who announced the creation of the Commission Artistique in Le Rappel of 1 October 1870.33 Degas was actively involved in these events, but, sometime after the beginning of the Commune, he left Paris for Normandy to stay with the Valpinçons at the Ménil-Hubert, as he did every year. In Normandy he could paint, even if he had to make do with found materials:

Fig. 9-2 Portrait of Mlle Hortense Valpinçon, c. 1871, oil on mattress ticking, cm 75.57 x 113.67 (canvas), Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

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the Portrait of Hortense Valpinçon (Fig. 9-2) was executed on mattress ticking for want of canvas. In the three-quarter-length portrait Degas did of Hortense, the nine-year-old, daughter of Paul and Claire Valpinçon, is seen in profile on the right-hand side of the picture. She turns her head towards the viewer, while holding a piece of apple that she has picked up from a plate sitting on the table on which she is leaning. On the same table, to the left-hand side, we see her mother’s sewing basket, out of which hang sewing material, and a large piece of embroidery. This allusion to Claire’s work, which can be regarded as in progress, or as interrupted, like Degas’s own painting in the time of the Commune, does not simply “call to mind many months of quiet, patient domesticity in this somewhat protected ambience,” as we read in the catalogue of the 1988 Degas exhibition.34 The painting signifies interrupted feminine work, and, more broadly, signifies the art of painting in itself, intended as craft and skill. Degas’s focus here is on the rendering of the textures and colours of the diverse pieces of fabric that appear in the picture. From the background of beige wall-paper, dotted with red flowers, to Hortense’s white apron over a black dress, to her woolen shawl, and black ribbon tied around her straw hat; from the porcelain plate to the wicker basket, and from the Oriental reminiscences of the black tablecloth with coloured floral patterns, to the white piece of embroidery, also with floral designs, the observer’s eye is led to appreciate nothing but “the work” in itself. Degas has wanted this painting as a celebration of Claire’s work, the essentially painterly and feminine work of embroidery and lace-making, metaphors for Degas’s own painting: a painting is done with coloured threads, like Johannes Vermeer’s La Dentellière (Musée du Louvre) embroiders with oil paint. In this respect, I read this portrait as a transgressive and political image, resounding with the revolution through which Parisian Communard artists, just as Degas was painting it, were elevating the status of decorative or industrial arts to the rank of the fine arts, and the status of the artisan to that of artist. While Degas was in Normandy, things in Paris were evolving. In midApril 1871, the Commission was supplanted by the Fédération des Artistes, presided over by Courbet. As Sánchez has shown, the role accorded to the decorative and industrial arts was an innovative aspect of the Fédération des Artistes, which “was innocently optimistic over the aesthetic acceptability of all good-faith artisanal production” and believed that all the arts “were artisanal in procedure and socialization, skilled, dignified and moralizing.” The Communards, writes Sánchez, “wished to put an end to the conditions that gave rise to the bohemian counter-world in their midst and not to perpetuate it, as has sometimes been assumed.”35

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The Commission artistique and its successor, the Fédération des Artistes, had been founded to bring about a radical change in the French art system, at all levels: artistic education, patronage, and production. Unconcerned by issues related to the production of images, such as style or content, the Commission, and later the Fédération, focused above all on the discussion of urgent issues pertaining artists’ self-government in matters of exhibitions, their associational relationships, their autonomy, and social position as professionals. These ideas were all inherited from the revolutionary tradition of the artists’ assemblies of 1789-1848, and, even if the degree and nature of the artists’ politicisation was not consistent, their republican oppositional culture harnessed the general discontent with the overcrowded Salon, widespread among Parisian artists, around its fundamental value: the organisational element.36 This would also play a role in the Impressionist installations of 1874-1886. To close the narration of Degas’s vicissitudes during the Commune, the painter returned to Paris on June 1. By then the Commune had been defeated by the troops of the Versailles government, who had entered Paris on May 21, and were to begin the bloody repression of thousands of Communards. In the so-called semaine sanglante (May 21-28) fell the hardest fighting of the revolutionaries, barricaded on the eastern side of Paris, at the Buttes-Chaumont, and in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, where the last of them were shot. The Commune of Paris ended with the taking of the fortress of Vincennes, the last Communard bastion. In commenting on such events, Manet and Degas spoke in favour of the Communards. We know this from a letter of Mme Morisot of June 5, 1871. Describing to her daughter Berthe the burning of the Hôtel de Ville, the Louvre nicked by projectiles, and the rue Royale half demolished, she referred to her son Tiburce meeting Manet and Degas: Tiburce has met two Communards, at this moment when they are being all shot…Manet and Degas! Even at this stage they are condemning the drastic measures used to repress them. I think they are insane, don’t you?37

This leads us to consider, in the next section of this chapter, an important aspect of Degas’s republicanism and avant-gardism, his engagement in collective practices in a subversive and anarchistic-socialist context.

4. Collaboration In Chapter Six I discussed the avant-gardism of the Impressionist exhibitions as instances of a takeover of the city, as well as being installations, that is, instances of the avant-garde practice par excellence,

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the creation of environments. What follows is a consideration of how the Impressionist exhibitions embraced the revolutionary legacy of the Communard Fédération des Artistes, a topic that has been studied in detail by Sánchez. It interests us here in relation to the political ideas, and the nature of the republicanism behind Degas’s engagement in the collective shows of 1874-1886. It is worth recalling that, at the moment of the Impressionist ventures, the two individuals who had been sharing the republican cause, and their support of the Communards, Manet and Degas, took different roads: Manet the solitary one, Degas the collective one, both with the Impressionists, and in such practices as collaborative printmaking with Pissarro, Cassatt, Lepic and others. Furthermore, because the republicanism of the Impressionists, albeit different for each artist, went hand in hand with a cultural/artistic nationalism fuelled by the defeat of France, we will also consider how some of Degas’s themes of the 1870s and 1880s (café-concert singers, brothels, bathers, dancers, and milliners) were executed in unorthodox media and techniques (such as monotypes, pastel, distemper and gouache, which were also combined), and instanced Degas’s idea of Parisian-ness identified as a construction of nintharrondissement floating world and monde artiste, as has been defined by Louis Chevalier.38 Nord has studied the “new painting” of the Impressionists in the light of their political faith, proposing that they were only partially bound by a shared generational experience and that, considering how different they were from each other in background, personality, and artistic style, what really gave coherence to these artists was their republican faith. Their republicanism, in the 1860s, intersected with the cause of the new painting: the artists of the avant-garde stood then side by side, supporting the practices of landscape painting and printmaking, and claiming their adoption of Japanese aesthetics in a politically “confrontational” attitude of militancy against the academic tradition of flawlessness, as Nord puts it.39 According to Nord, with the passing of the years, just as the purpose of the new painting crystallised, the painters lost their common political purpose. This divergence reached its peak in the 1890s, when the onceallied Clemenceau and Rochefort stood against each other at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, as would the Dreyfusards Monet and Pissarro against the anti-Dreyfusards Cézanne, Renoir, and Degas.40 Manet had been dead since 1883, and his republicanism, as well as his modernism and charming personality are uncompromised. In Degas’s case, instead, Nord struggles to reconcile old clichés gleaned from other writers (such as Degas’s supposed wealth, high-bourgeois status, and Right-wing conservatism), with his own perception of Degas as a ‘young man of prickly

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independence” and “of tolerant and progressive views.”41Although these latter perceptions are just, Nord’s view of Degas’s republicanism as “transient” can perhaps be adjusted. Degas in fact was a republican most of his life. In his old age, confronted with what he saw as the corruption of the nation in the last decades of the nineteenth-century, he became disappointed with the Republic, and an anarchist. However, in the 1870s and until around 1886, Degas’s social contacts, and his involvement in artistic collective practices, make it hard to claim that his republicanism was “transient.” After the end of the Commune, Degas’s social life resumed, including the musical evenings at the Manets. On July 14, 1871 Mme Morisot wrote her daughter Berthe: I found the salon Manet in the same state as before; it is nauseating. If people were not interested in hearing individual accounts of public misfortunes, I think little would have been said. The heat was stifling, everybody was cooped up in the one drawing room, the drinks were warm. But Pagans sang, Madame Edouard sang, and Monsieur Degas was there. This is not to say that he flitted about; he looked very sleepy- your father seemed younger than he.42

Perhaps Degas was bored with them, although, he continued to see the Manets and the Morisots. Due to the circumstance of the war, however, he had also entered new social circles. One was established by his friendship with his captain during the war, Henri Rouart, and his brother Alexis. Henri lived in eastern Paris, at 149 boulevard Oberkampf, not far from the site of a factory he owned, located in the boulevard Voltaire. Shortly, both he and his brother would move close to Degas, in the rue de Lisbonne, where the architect Henri Fevre, Degas’s brother-in-law, designed two houses for them. Art was a ground of affinity between Degas and the Rouarts. Besides being an engineer and a businessman, Henri was a landscape painter (he had exhibited at the Salon between 1868 and 1872) and a collector of modern art. His wife, Hélène Jacob-Desmalter, was from a family of cabinet makers. Since the end of the war, Henri hosted Friday dinners that brought together his military entourage of colonels (Meliaudon, Mercier, Thion, Lipmann) and artists such as Degas, Levert, Armand Gauthier, Gustave Collin. Tuesday was the day Degas went to Henri’s brother, Alexis, also an art collector.43 In 1871, immediately after the war, Degas painted Henri Rouart and his daughter Hélène (in a private collection). The bearded Henri is portrayed as a family man and artist, sitting with his young daughter on his knees, with one of his green landscapes featuring in the background. In 1875, Degas would instead portray him as a top-hatted capitalist in Henri Rouart in front of his Factory (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh). In this three-quarter-length

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portrait, Henri, in top hat and black suit, stands in profile, with a determined look in his eyes, and in the background we see not a green landscape, but the grey expanse of a concrete floor and his factory, its chimneys rising in the grey sky. During the organisation of the Impressionist shows, Rouart would be with Degas among the most engaged founders of the Société Anonyme, in December 1873, and the friendship between Degas and Rouart would last until Rouart’s death. Degas was now also very close to Ludovic Lepic, an etcher in the Dutch and Flemish tradition, who specialised in landscape painting of atmospheric effects, flat landscapes dotted with such Dutch motifs as iceskaters, canals, windmills, fishing and sailboats.44 Lepic and Degas shared an interest in ballet dancers and horses. Although not exactly remembered today as an avant-garde artist, Lepic had an important role in Degas’s life and art, as they shared their engagement with Northern-ness, especially in

Fig. 9-3 Mme Jeantaud at the Mirror, 1875, oil on canvas, cm 70 x 84, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

the field of collaborative printmaking. They became friends after the war, during which Lepic had been taken prisoner at Sedan.45 Degas and Lepic met at the home of the Jeantauds, according to Lemoisne.46 Lepic posed for many of Degas’s paintings of the 1870s: at times with his children and dogs, like Van Dyck’s Genoese and English aristocrats, and in a few of Degas’s race course canvases. Lepic also figures in the second version of The Ballet of ‘Robert le Diable’ (1876, Victoria and Albert Museum,

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London), where he is seen in the stalls. In the 1871 version of the painting it was Albert Hecht who appeared centrally, looking up through a pair of binoculars. In the 1876 version Degas moved Hecht to the left-hand side of the canvas. Degas and Lepic probably shared strong feelings of revanchisme. Not only did Degas give his own direct interpretation of the mournful iconography of the Alsatian woman in his portrait of Mme de Rutté (1875, private collection),47 but another relation to artistic circles of revanchisme can be found in the two portraits Degas executed of Mme Jeantaud, née Berthe Marie Bachoux. Mme Jeantaud was Lepic’s cousin, and the wife of Charles, who had been in the National Guard with Degas in the war of 1870-71, and one of the men in the triple portrait by Degas commemorating the Guardsmen sociability. In these years, Mme Jeantaud was portrayed both by Degas and by their common friend, Jean-Jacques Henner, the Alsatian painter. Henner, who still visited his village in Alsace, even after the region was annexed to Germany, signed such works as L’Alsace, elle attend, where Alsace is represented as a young woman mournfully dressed in black.48 In Degas’s 1875 portrait, Mme Jeantaud at the Mirror (Fig. 9-3) we see her in profile, standing in front of the mirror, which in turn reflects and shows us her frontal image. She is wearing a hat and dressed in all her finery, in fur and muf. She must be about to go out. The picture is all in the tones of the earth, with its strokes of brown, beige, black, and grey. A patch of blue-green indicates a section of an armchair behind Mme Jeantaud. In another portrait of Mme Jeantaud by Degas, she appears with two dogs, maybe given to her by her cousin Lepic, who used to breed dogs. It was above all in the field of collaborative printmaking, in emulation of the Northern artists, that the Lepic-Degas friendship is relevant. Lepic was a member of the Société des Aquafortistes. In one of his double portraits with meanings of artistic brotherhood, Degas portrayed Lepic and Marcellin Desboutin etching together. Desboutin is holding a metal plate and a burin, watched by Lepic, with a dog sitting at his feet. On a table we see a rag, which Lepic in his writings about etching considered one of the two “weapons,” the other being the metal plate, with which modern artists could renew the art of etching (Fig. 9-4). Around 1875, Degas and Lepic produced in partnership a monotype that bears the signatures of both artists.49 In The Ballet Master (Fig. 9-5), a dancer on tiptoes is watched over by her ballet master, leaning on his cane. This subject matter is suggestive and meaningful, both when seen in the collaborative context of learning and sharing of techniques in which Degas and Lepic worked around 1875, and when seen as another instance of Degas’s ballerinas as

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symbols for the engaged artist, one who works, and learns, under the eye of the masters.50 The Ballet Master was Degas’s first monotype, a variation on the “eau-forte mobile,” a technique that Lepic claimed to have invented, as he wrote in Comment je devins graveur à l’eau forte. Petite lettre à un ami. This essay, in the form of a letter to a friend, appeared in Raoul de Saint-Arroman’s La Gravure à l’eau-forte, published by Cadart in 1876. In it, Saint-Arroman declared that: Notre époque subit le joug triomphant des vrais maîtres de l’eau-forte. On étudie, on pénètre, on sent l’œuvre de Rembrandt avec tant de puissance que c’est lui-même en quelque sorte qui dirige le combat actuel.51

It was the rich painterly quality of Rembrandt’s prints that showed the painter-printmaker’s supreme mastery, the same that the peintres-graveurs of the former Société des Aquafortistes were trying to achieve.52 In his book, Saint-Arroman introduced Lepic as the author of the “eau-forte mobile,” a technique praised for its spontaneity: L’auteur, le comte Le Pic, procède d’abord comme les peintres à l’eauforte. Il bâtit son tableau, mais, bien entendu, d’après la loi suprême de spontanéité qui est, nous l’avons vu, la vie même de l’œuvre: c'est-à-dire que la pensée et l’exécution, l’ordonnance et le détail, le dessin et la gravure, jaillissent en même temps, d’un seul jet. Rien de successif; chaque trait est quelque chose d’un ensemble qui est arrêté et voulu; il tombe sur la plaque, immédiat et irrémissible.

As Saint-Arroman described, in the eau-forte mobile, after having obtained a first and unique print, Lepic would take the metal plate again, and would begin “le travail de mobilisation,” that is, the artist would play freely with the ink in order to pull a new, different impression, this also a unique print.53 In his Comment je devins graveur à l’eau forte. Petite lettre à un ami, Lepic wrote that, as a self-taught etcher, he gave way to experimentalism to be able to achieve in his prints the painterly qualities of the prints of Rembrandt, Van Ostade, and their contemporaries.54 For Lepic, etching was the most free and independent of all the arts, insofar as the painter-engravers executed and pulled their own prints, as Rembrandt did: sans cela, l’eau-forte n’est qu’un métier comme un autre que tout le monde peut faire, car il n’est pas difficile, en copiant une photographie par exemple, d’obtenir une eau-forte passable.

The prints of the Dutch masters were all unique, original works, and their technique, the eau-forte mobile, Lepic claimed to have rediscovered and

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spread as a “genre nouveau” of which he was the “apostle,” despite the suspicions and critiques attracted by the fact that Lepic would not patent the eau-forte mobile.55 This way of obtaining unique prints from the same etched plate, by freely inking the plate anew after each impression, and by varying the kind and amount of ink used in each impression, could be restored by the modern artist with the aid of two “weapons,” the ink and the rag, to be used on the metal plate.56 In the variation of monotype that Degas learnt from Lepic, a smooth plate was inked, and the artist used a cloth to draw, or vary the quantity and distribution of the greasy ink. The artist could play freely with the desired tones, which could be subtle, or stark contrasts of black and white. To such contrasts of black and white alluded the night and day of Le Jour et la Nuit, the name for the print magazine the publication of which Degas was planning with Pissarro and Mary Cassatt. The artist could obtain a print that had the quality of drawing, and whose creation or production could be controlled at will by the artist, unlike drawing with a pencil. As Parry Janis has written, Degas found that the monotype was “an essential, liberating, initial procedure,” in which he could draw without a pencil. Having “rid himself of line,” but not abandoned it, the artist could concentrate on composing. According to Janis, Degas took up the monotype because it prolonged “the flexible unfinished stage of the sketch,” and “retained the suggestiveness of sketches that Degas’s own preparatory drawings lacked.”57

Fig. 9-4 Lepic and Desboutin, 1876, oil on canvas, cm 72 x 81, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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Fig. 9-5 Edgar Degas and Ludovic Lepic, The Ballet Master, 1874, monotype heightened with white chalk, The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

With the monotype, the artist did not want to produce mechanically a series of prints, but apply the printing process to the production of a single, original print, a unique work of art, which could sometimes be followed by a weaker second or third print, on which the artist could work with other media, such as pastel, as often in the case of Degas. As has been written, the “paradoxical nature of the original print” found all its meaning in the monotype, which became favoured by avant-garde printers. Like Dürer and Rembrandt, the modern painter-engravers wanted to execute and print their unique works.58 Their aim was to differentiate themselves “from the anonymity of industry,” and, as Antonia Lant has written, “it became necessary for artists entirely to dissociate their hand-produced etchings from reproductive engravings and mechanically produced prints.” Unconventional media and practices were adopted and justified by the artists’ only priority, to produce a unique original print with painterly qualities. In this crossing of the boundaries, as Lant has described it, between painting, print-making, and drawing, Degas, as well as Lepic, Pissarro and Cassatt, felt free to break accepted rules and practices. In this purely “exploratory” and “experimental activity,” “the etching of the plate would be pushed to its limits” as witness the worn-out state of Degas’s and Pissarro’s surviving metal plates.59 In their collaborative etching, Degas, Lepic and the others were also self-fashioning as Northern paintersengravers through collaboration, a practice that had been common in the Netherlands during the Golden Age. Collaboration between artists, each contributing according to his specialisation, and with the aim to produce a

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single artwork, “is virtually synonymous with painting in the Low Countries in the years before 1700,” as Anne Woollett has written about the works executed by Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder between 1598 and 1625. 60 What drew the artists of the French nineteenth century to collaborative works? In the case of Degas, Pissarro, Lepic and Desboutin, for instance, or in the case of Fantin-Latour and his wife Victoria Dubourg, working together as the Dutch and Flemish painters had done centuries before, was an instance of avant-garde mentality which brought forward the issue of circles of modern Parisian artists supporting each other, through their affinities and commonality of interests, in inventive art-making processes, and in original subject matter. Degas advocated working with other artists in search of new techniques. He was close to Félix Bracquemond, a peintre-graveur who had been at the forefront of such engravers’ enterprises of the 1860s as the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and the Société des Aquafortistes (1862).61 Bracquemond would join the Société Anonyme in 1874. Degas also admired and praised the work of Marie Bracquemond, Félix’s wife, who painted on tiles and had exhibited a mural composition on tiles at the 1878 Universal Exhibition. In 1872, Bracquemond was appointed artistic director of the Haviland & Co., a company that produced Limoges porcelain and ceramics. The company had just opened a workshop at Auteuil. In the mid-1870s, through his friendship with Bracquemond, Degas was able on occasions to use the printing facilities of the atelier at Auteuil, and both he and Pissarro experimented with painting on ceramics. Combining experimental supports and media with his Parisian themes, Degas produced a painting on tile, showing a café-concert singer, and a small dinner set, featuring dancers and horses. According to Richard Thomson, who has studied Degas’s painting on tile, the artist’s interest in applied arts, printmaking, and illustration were attempts at “moneymaking initiatives.” Degas’s worsened financial situation after 1874 resulted in a “new willingness to operate lower down the artistic hierarchy,” consistently with what Pissarro was doing, whose “financial position was, if anything, worse than Degas’s.” Thomson sees Degas and Pissarro’s experiments with ceramics and illustration as “attempts to reach a wider market.” For Thomson, furthermore, while ceramics was a serious and regular pursuit for Bracquemond and Pissarro, Degas quickly dropped this “amateurish dabblings in media to which he was unaccustomed,” because this “was only a passing fad for the ever-experimental Degas.”62 But while artists struggling to survive would naturally be attempting to reach wider markets, I would emphasise that, albeit temporary, Degas’s engagement

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with painting on tiles speaks for experimentalism and modernity. More in general, Degas and Pissarro’s common ideas and projects, whether brief, as in the decorative arts, or more long-lasting, as in printmaking, remain indicative of the fact that Degas and Pissarro worked within the Communard/revolutionary state of mind which claimed for the industrial or applied arts a status equivalent to that of fine arts. Just as Pissarro was “preoccupied with eliminating pictorial hierarchies,” as Michel Melot has written, so was Degas.63 In this spirit, at the 1874 exhibition of the Société Anonyme, Lepic, Rouart and Bracquemond exhibited their etchings as a “manifeste de la nouvelle estampe,” to use Melot’s words, and at the fifth exhibition of the group there was “une entrée en force de la gravure,” with the numerous prints exhibited by Degas, Pissarro, Cassatt, Forain, Levert, and others.64 The late 1870s were for Degas years of intense collaborative work, especially with Pissarro, both in the organisation of the independent shows, and in their engagement in avant-garde printmaking. It is not possible here to study the relationship between Pissarro and Degas in depth, but it seems that the art and politics of the two colleagues interrelated. In an undated letter of 1879, Degas wrote to Bracquemond that “Pissarro is delightful in his enthusiasm and faith.”65 Pissarro regarded Degas as the greatest artist of the period, as he often repeated while forwarding to his son Lucien, in London, Degas’s advice that he should draw from memory.66 This was the case all along the 1880s and 1890s, and until Pissarro’s death in 1903. Indeed, their friendship survived the Dreyfus Affair, when the opinions of the Dreyfusard Pissarro and of the anti-Dreyfusard Degas must have frequently jarred. Before the Affair, their closeness extended to such political opinions as the deception with the Third Republic, and with the supposed decadence of France, as well as to their interest in Proudhon’s theories, which were themselves hostile to Jews on the grounds of anti-capitalist arguments. While Pissarro sometimes expected of Degas a consistency of aesthetics and politics that he did not always find in him, it is revealing that Pissarro always tried to understand Degas’s motivations. In a letter of April 1891, Pissarro described to his son Lucien his hardships: the lack of moral and financial support from Durand-Ruel made him grieve over the art dealer Theo van Gogh, now dead, while Pissarro wondered about why his art was not understood: Perhaps I am out of date, or my art may conflict and not be conciliable with the general trend which seems to have gone mystical. It must be that only another generation, free from all religious, mystical, unclear conceptions, a generation which would again turn in the direction of the

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Pissarro suspected in Degas’s appreciation of Gauguin a religious inclination that he struggled to reconcile with Degas’s admiration for Pissarro himself. And yet, Pissarro made sense of Degas’s position as that of an anarchist in art. Like Pissarro, an engaged anarcho-socialist, Degas endorsed collaboration, and in his self-fashioning as peintre-graveur, and in his closeness to Bracquemond and Pissarro in the 1870s and 1880s I see Degas’s belief in social force, rather than individuality, which was more Manet’s straightforwardly liberal way. Around 1879, Degas conceived with Pissarro, Bracquemond, and Cassatt the idea of a print magazine called Le Jour et la Nuit, a project responding to one of the missions that the artists had given to themselves as a group, that of issuing a periodical.68 Nothing came of the project, but it remains relevant in two respects. First, the project announces the proliferation of periodicals in turn-of-the-century Paris, denoting the modernity of Paris as an espace culturel in which “toutes les libertés sont accordées de façon durable” as Christophe Charle has written. The extreme attraction exerted by Paris in the Belle Epoque, and its role of “creuset de toutes les audaces,” derive for Charle from being a political and cultural space “où la lutte pour la vie (métaphore récurrente du temps) plaçait chaque producteur de biens symboliques dans un climat de tension extrême.” In fin-de-siècle Paris, where a few deplored “non les excès, mais les faiblesses du pouvoir,” the fight for life “pousse à toutes les audaces,” including refusal, cynicism, racism, xenophobia, feminism as well as extreme misogyny.69 Such fin-de-siècle Parisian modernity as the cultural and political space of anarchy is what Degas and his fellow artists of the avant-garde were building through their group sociability and action. To return to the project of Le Jour et la Nuit, its second relevant aspect is that Degas’s notebooks, and his letters to Pissarro and Bracquemond of 1879-1880, reveal his anarcho-socialism. This is intended not so much as a consistent political faith, but as his level of personal concern in bringing to life a shared project: it refers to Degas sharing his press with Pissarro, as well as to his search for advertisement strategies, and “capitalists,” as Degas defined them, who would sponsor the magazine, such as Caillebotte

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and Ernest May.70 Degas, Caillebotte, and Manet have often been grouped together as the high bourgeois among the Parisian artists of the avantgarde.71 In this mapping a bohemian Degas, it is worth recalling that, despite Degas’s conventional reputation as a high bourgeois, like Manet and Caillebotte, in fact it was Degas who differentiated himself from Manet and Caillebotte, by defining Caillebotte as a “capitalist” and Manet a “bourgeois.” One can hear an echo of Degas’s populism in Caillebotte’s complaint, in a letter to Pissarro of January 1881, that Degas spent too much time “holding forth at the Nouvelle Athènes” and not enough working in his studio.72 In my interpretation of Degas as a bohemian and an anarchist, Degas’s anti-Semitism was a function of his anti-capitalism and socialism, which were quite explicit in the late 1870s, as we can see in the project for Le Jour et la Nuit. The other capitalist who was supposed to sponsor the Le Jour et la Nuit was the financier and art collector Ernest May.73 Degas had portrayed May at the Stock Exchange (1878-79, Musée d’Orsay), when, in the same months of the magazine project, he wrote to Bracquemond to inform him that May was interested in buying a drawing by Bracquemond. Degas so described May: He is getting married, is going to take a town house and arrange his little collection as a gallery. He is a Jew; he has organised a sale for the benefit of the wife of Monchot, who went mad. You see he is a man who is throwing himself into the arts.74

Clearly Degas implied an association of Jewry with capitalism, like Proudhon and Marx. Before the Dreyfus Affair, the rhetoric of antiSemitism was common to the Right and the Left, and, for many communists, socialists, and anarchists, the Jew represented capitalism, but to Degas’s eyes, Caillebotte was as much a capitalist as May. Degas’s anti-Semitism of the 1890s is coherent both with his hostility to a capitalism upon which he depended for survival, and with Left-wing ideals of collective work and group action. The issues of collective work and experimentalism are woven together with Degas’s choice of his techniques and themes. He was practising such print techniques as monotype, as well as etching and lithography, which were described as “intransigent” by Henri Béraldi in 1886.75 He also used his prints as a support for such media as pastel, gouache, and distemper, in whose matt-ness Degas sought the primitivism that meant originality. As for the themes, it was not just a matter of representing modern life, but of a certain type of modern life: in times of Moral Order, such as those of the Third Republic until 1878, cabaret scenes, nudes, brothels, bathers, and dancers, were all constituents of a subversive idea of ninth-

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arrondissement Parisian-ness which combined pleasure and crime, to paraphrase Louis Chevalier’s history of Montmartre du plaisir et du crime (1980). The association of certain printing techniques, themes, and compositional devices in Degas’s artworks of the late 1870s-80s cannot be separated from a consideration of Degas’s Japonisme. As Lant has written, the monotypes were for Degas “a research tool with which he could experiment with the new language from Japan.”76 The adoption of friezelike formats, and diverse compositional devices (diagonal views, images cut along the frame, the asymmetric and grid-like layout) provided Degas with a “primitive” artistic language for what Gustave Geffroy described as “la prise de possession de l’univers,”77 while the subjects of the Ukiyo-e prints (horses, theatre, scenes of ordinary life, feminine occupations such as toilette and laundering, characteristic of the art of Japan of the Edo period) offered a connection with the depiction of his own “floating world,” Montmartre.78 This “taking refuge,” as Bouillon has characterised it, in other styles, such as Japonisme, to depict Parisian modernity, and convey subversive meanings, should be approached, as the French scholar suggests, through an “ethnographie politique” which would unveil the détournements to which subversive meanings are subjected. For Degas’s Montmartre themes, it was not just Japonisme that provided effective détournements in subject matter, but also the realism of Northern European tradition, that of Dutch genre scenes, for example, or of Dürer’s bath-houses (1496, Kunsthalle, Bremen). As Françoise Nora has noted, Degas’s scenes of naked women, waking up or going to bed, and wearing only their bonnet, are truly Dutch.79 The café-concert was one of Degas’s favourite amusements. According to his brother René, visiting Paris from New Orleans in 1872, the painter, who was now living at 77 rue Blanche, took him to see the “memorable” places of the siege of Paris, and the café-chantant at the Champs Elysées, to listen to “des chansons d’idiots, telle que la chanson du compagnon maçon et d’auters bétises absurdes.”80 More than ten years later, Degas wrote to Henri Lerolle: “go at once to hear Thérésa at the Alcazar, rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière. It is near the Conservatoire and it is better.” Thérésa, who “should be put on to Gluck,” opens her large mouth and there emerges the most roughly, the most delicately, the most spiritually tender voice imaginable. And the soul, and the good taste, where could one find better? It is admirable.”81

In the gardens of the Champs Elysées, at the Café des Ambassadeurs, and at the Alcazar d’été, Degas went to see Thérésa, Emilie Bécat, and other chanteuses de caf’ conc’.82

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Around 1877 Degas executed a series of monotypes featuring brothel scenes. As Loyrette has written, while Degas may have painted dance classes without having seen them, there is evidence that he, like many of his friends, went to the brothel. But the Parisian brothel, for Loyrette, was, as in Guy de Maupassant’s novels, “a kind of club,” the attendance of which did not necessarily imply the search for sexual services. It could be, like Degas’s brothel, an unpretentious Parisian brothel where habitual customers would meet, have a drink, and chat with the girls, or with the respected Madame. For Loyrette, in his brothel monotypes, Degas is describing the brothel he frequents, “simply,” with images of a “prostitution bon enfant, toujours gaie et souriante.” For Loyrette, Degas’s brothel scenes are neither an attack against this kind of establishment nor a pamphlet on the misery and exploitation of women. They are a “fantasme masculin,” the dream of a feminine universe, “demeure confidentielle, tiède, enveloppante, essentiellement bourgeoise,” full of naked and vulgar, but good-hearted, girls.83 While Loyrette’s sympathetic reading of Degas’s brothel monotypes touches, albeit only in passing, on the issue of Degas’s sexuality, Lant has read the brothel scenes mainly from a technical point of view. For her, the brothel is linked by affinity with the “ambiguous shifting monotype medium,” an affinity in which the medium is “a direct equivalent for the parts of nature selected for depiction, the equals sign in the equation between reality and representation, unobtrusive.”84

Fig. 9-6 La Fête de la Patronne, 187, pastel over monotype, Musée Picasso, Paris.

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Nora had made the same association between the monotype medium, a technique which she defines as “par nature ambiguë, indirecte et unique à la fois,” in its being a print and a drawing at the same time, and the subject matter, which for her accounts for the peculiar and secret relationship between Degas and the feminine world. Degas, Nora writes, had the “vie intime” of a “bourgeois misanthrope” and of a “célibataire endurci,” but she does not see in the brothel scenes the cruelty towards, and refusal of femininity, that other critics have attributed to the artist. For her, the brothel scenes are goodhearted and funny, as is La Fête de la Patronne (Fig. 9-6).85 The brothel for Degas would have, no doubt, functioned for the hygiene and instruction of the garçon.86 But for a city bachelor such as Degas, the brothel would also endorse a bataillean economy of the dépense, rather than an economy of production and conservation, consistently with Degas’s embrace of artistic bachelorhood. Café-concert scenes, brothels, bathers, and dancers, were all constituents of a subversive idea of ninth-arrondissement Parisian-ness that combined pleasure and crime. As Michel Melot has written, the reactionary Third Republic was “especially hostile to modern art” because it “had no use for realism and the program of social and economic redress it implied.” According to Melot, Pissarro’s iconography of rural workers, and such “figures en route,” and marginal types such as immigrants, vagabonds and homeless were “protoanarchist.” As Melot argues, it would be impossible to conclude, from the visual evidence of the works alone, that Pissarro’s works have anything to do with politics. Melot then considers the peculiar practice of art of Degas and Pissarro, the etchings signed by Pissarro, and printed by Degas, and the letters between the two, revealing “their profound agreement about the practice of art and even its contents.” “They fought the same enemies,” writes Melot. But the French scholar struggles to match his correct ideas about Degas’s political stance with the conventional, overwhelming, image of a Right-wing Degas, and only reluctantly surrenders to the evidence that Degas was not an ideologue, but an anarcho-socialist, in the late 1870s: Degas’s reactionary opinions are well known, he shouted them loudly enough. This banker’s son, an anti-Semite, misogynist, upholder of tradition, admired the old masters; and if he had a preference among modern artists, it was for the conservative academic painter Bouguereau and not Millet. Yet, the etchings we are studying made between 18791880, can be considered the product of their close collaboration.87

For Melot, Degas and Pissarro “created an art in common” because “they had a common practice,” which expressed “a common ideology,” they

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“made common cause in the studio “against the traditional system of art,” and yet for Melot, Pissarro was “a man of the far Left” and Degas “a man of the far Right.”88 I argue that Degas’s and Pissarro shared not so much an ideology, but a set of political ideas beneath their common studio practice, and that Degas’s iconography of urban workers was also anarchist.

5. Revolutionary Impressionists Pissarro, Degas, Rouart, Bracquemond, and Lepic, all became involved in the Société Anonyme de Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc. created with the following goals in mind: the organisation of free, open exhibitions, without juries and awards; the sale of the exhibited artworks, and the publication of an independent art journal. The avant-garde artists of the Société Anonyme were promoting themselves in an unofficial and subversive way. Pissarro, Degas, and the others were subversive, if not revolutionary, not just because the programme of the Communard Fédération des Artistes inspired their idea of artists’ self-government, but also because they had involved a few of the personnel of the Fédération, in their creation of the Société Anonyme, as Sánchez has written. The charter of the Société Anonyme, dated 23 December 1873, had been based by Pissarro on the bakers’ union charter of Pontoise, where he lived, but as Sánchez remarks, the charter was drawn up with the “crucial assistance” of four Communards, who had been central figures of the Fédération des Artistes: Alfred Meyer, Edmé Chabert, and the Léon Ottins, father and son. They had escaped the harsh punishment that struck other Communards, for instance Courbet, but at the moment of their involvement with the Impressionists, Meyer, Chabert, and the Ottins, all ex-Communards, lived under police watch. At the same time, they enjoyed “growing influence in the worlds of the arts, artistic organizations, and politics.”89 The sculptor Ottin père knew how hard it was to survive as an artist in Paris. As Sánchez summarises, Ottin had been a Prix de Rome in 1836, and had received many Salon medals between 1840 and the 1867 Universal Exhibition, but he had also fought on the barricades in 1848. His unstable (or bohemian) situation is indicated by the fact that, during the Second Empire, he derived his income from public commissions for works on the façade of the Paris Opera, but he literally had to beg the administration for such commissions.90 In 1870, Ottin published a proposal for artists’ self-organisation, the Organisation des arts du dessin: Expositions publiques, encouragements, commandes officielles (which

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was supported by four hundreds artists including Cabanel, Gérôme, Viollet-le-Duc, Millet, Puvis de Chavannes and Manet).91 Furthermore, during the Paris Commune, Ottin was a representative of Parisian sculptors, one of the 47 delegates of the Fédération des Artistes elected to be grouped under five branches of the arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, lithography and engraving, decorative or industrial arts).92 Ottin père and Pissarro knew each other from their common membership in one of the earliest Parisian artists’ societies, Baron Taylor’s association.93 In December 1873, the ex-Communard Ottin was named treasurer and member of the committee of the Société Anonyme. According to Sánchez, he was only “a passive and pliable officer,” willing to help the other founders of the group for his organisational interests. Nevertheless, the association with Ottin père brought the Impressionists to the attention of the police. It was found that the association had no political inclinations, but subsequently Ottin was accused of belonging to the Internationale and “a daily patrol was assigned to follow his every move.”94 The other Communard involved with the foundation of the Société Anonyme was Edmé Chabert, the head of the 149th battalion of the National Guards, which was arrested en masse during the last fighting on the barricades. After four-and-a-half months on a prison barge, La Prudence, and a trial, Chabert was acquitted but, both as an acquitted Communard, and a member of the International, the police closely followed him for his attempts at artistic self-organisation and unionism. In 1873 Chabert went as a delegate for French engravers to the Vienna Universal Exhibition, in the company of Ottin père and Alfred Meyer, the other Communard involved in the creation of the Société Anonyme, who worked as a chief artist at the Sèvres porcelain manufacture. Both the Vienna and Paris police feared that the trip was “a possible extension of the Commune” and watched the moves of the three.95 The charter of the Société Anonyme of December 1873 was dissolved on 17 December 1874. As Sánchez writes, discussion over the future of the independent exhibitors revolved around whether the venture should be considered only as an informal, convenient one-time group show, and a market outlet (for which Ottin fils and the majority of the artists involved suggested that they should create a société en participation), or as the expression of a more politically engaged corporation, for which Meyer, Chabert, and Pissarro supported the option of a société coopérative. Despite the general dissatisfaction with the corporatist arrangement, the cooperative option won, and Meyer set up the Union Artistique, which evoked “a syndicalist rather than a commercial or even aesthetic standpoint,” while maintaining all the goals of the former society (the

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mission of exhibiting and selling works, and publishing an art journal). The Union Artistique organised the 1875 Impressionist show.96 Among Parisian artists struggling for survival commercial concerns seemed to prevail, in theory and debate at least, over “the communal and social concern of the republicanism so allied to the Fédération: the organization of arts education, the propagation of civic decoration as pedagogy, and the solidarity of artisans.” But the Communard spirit lived through the Impressionists, in their effort to get rid of “the old tutelage of the state over artists,” in order to be able to “associate in groups that would better represent individuals in view of exhibitions and sales.”97 In view of what Sánchez has written about the Impressionists as heirs to the Communards, it becomes hard to reconcile Degas’s activities and social contacts with the conventional image of the artist as a conservative bourgeois. As we will see in the next and last chapter of this study, Degas was never a conservative bourgeois, not even in his old age, which is usually associated with his presumed Right-wing anti-Semitism.

Notes 1

Nord, 2000, pp. 6-7. For comments on Degas’s anti-Semitism, see: Ajalbert, 1898; Pissarro, 1943, pp. 319-20 and p. 321; Halévy, 1966. 3 Buchanan, 1997. 4 The relationship between France and Prussia had been worsening since July 1866, when the battle of Sadowa sanctioned the elimination of Austria from the political scene and established the German confederation as the most powerful country in Europe. In May 1870 the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, proposed the candidature of the German prince Leopold of Hohenzollern to the throne of Spain. He renewed the candidature on 2 July 1870, to the indignation of French public opinion. On July 12, while taking the waters at Ems, the Kaiser William I retracted verbally the candidature. On July 13, the French ambassador Benedetti went to Ems to ask for a written confirmation of the agreement. This offended the Kaiser, who refused to comply. When the news of the events reached Bismarck in Berlin, through the so called “Ems telegram”, the Chancellor decided to render public its content. France had already been preparing war, but the episode of the Ems telegram came to justify the decision of the Corps Législatif that France go to war against the German Confederation led by Prussia. War was declared on 19 July. Napoleon III did not receive the expected military help from Italy and Austro-Hungary, so France found herself alone at war against Germany: see François Roth, entry “Guerre de 1870,” in Tulard, 1995, pp. 597-603. 5 See Clayson, 2002, p. 213. The book offers a detailed account of artistic life in Paris during the Franco-Prussian war. 2

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There he stayed until the summer of 1871, and then he moved to Holland, before returning to Paris in the autumn of 1871. 7 See Pissarro’s letters on London and Monet. Durand-Ruel had left Paris for London in the autumn of 1870, with his stock of artworks. In the English capital Durand-Ruel found another exile and a customer of his, Jean-Baptiste Faure, the famously republican Opera baritone and art collector. They became neighbours in Brompton Crescent. Durand-Ruel opened a gallery at 168 New Bond Street, founded the Society of French Artists and regularly exhibited, without much commercial success, the artworks of the Barbizonniers alongside those of Pissarro and Monet. The gallery closed in 1875. In 1882 Durand Ruel returned to London to open a new gallery at 13 King Street: see Venturi, 1970; Callen, 1973; Reid, 1977, and House, 1978. Also see Shanes, 1994 on Impressionist London. 8 Wilson-Bareau, 1991, p. 60. 9 Nord, 2000, p. 6. 10 Though Manet wrote to his wife every day to inform her of his guard services and of the events in Paris, it is not known exactly to which bastion along the city fortifications he was posted. According to Hollis Clayson, following one of Manet’s indications in a letter to Suzanne of November 1870, of being posted at the Porte de Saint-Ouen, he might have been stationed at Bastion 40: Clayson, 2002, pp. 213-4. Also see Darcel, 1870; Cachin, Moffett and Melot, 1983, p. 96 and Brombert, 1996, p. 280. 11 See Alain Faure, “The public meeting movement in Paris from 1868 to 1870,” in Rifkin and Thomas, eds., 1988, pp. 181-234. 12 Clayson, 2002. 13 See Fernand Beaucour, entry “Folies-Bergères” in Tulard, 1995, pp. 530-31. 14 Among the other institutions which underwent a change of function was the Opera, which became an infirmary for the wounded, its rooftops a semaphore station beaming messages by electric lights to other stations atop the Arc de Triomphe, the Pantheon and the Moulin de la Galette. There were barracks in the Tuileries. 15 I am applying here a concept of theorist of architecture Amos Rapoport, according to whom a neighbourhood with a distinctive character, architectural as much as social, can be called “subjective.” 16 See Milner, 1988 for the topic of Parisian artistic geography; see Goudeau, 1886 for cabaret culture in Montmartre and Chevalier, 1980 for Montmartre as the district “of pleasures and crimes.” See Weisberg, ed., 2001 for the topic of Montmartre as the cradle of anarchism. 17 See Loyrette, 1991, pp. 251-2. On the topic of Degas’s eyesight see Valéry, 1985; Sickert, 1923 and Kendall, 1988. 18 The Rouart brothers were business associates in the Rouart Frères & Cie, providers of iron structures, railway materials and, from 1866, refrigerating machinery. They had two factories, one at Montluçon and one in eastern Paris, at 137 boulevard Voltaire. Henri Rouart was not only an engineer and a businessman, but also a landscape painter and a collector of modern art. Henri Rouart and his

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family now entered Degas’s social life and after the war they sat for numerous portraits by Degas: see Loyrette 1991, p. 254 and Valéry, 1965, pp. 15-20. 19 Clayson has located Bastion 12 very exactly “at the Plateau d’Avron near Rosny in the eastern part of the ramparts, just north of the Bois de Vincennes and bout halfway between the streets that led to the communities of Montreuil and Bagnolet beyond the walls.”: Clayson, 2002, p. 305. 20 Hertz, 1920, p. 74 21 Assouline, 2004, p. 98. 22 Nord, 2000, p. 39. 23 On October 18, Mme Morisot related in a letter one of their social evenings and wrote: “Monsieur Degas was so affected by the death of one of his friends, the sculptor Cuvelier, that he was impossible. He and Manet almost came to blows arguing over the methods of defence and the use of the National Guard, although each of them was ready to die to save the country. (…) M. Degas joined the artillery, and by his own account has not yet heard a cannon go off. He is looking for an opportunity to hear that sound because he wants to know whether he can endure the detonation of his guns.”: Morisot, 1986, p. 56. See also MoreauNélaton, 1926, p. 127. 24 Lemoisne, 1946, p. 67 and Halévy, 1966, p. 118. 25 See Roth, in Tulard, 1995, pp. 597-603. 26 In the early morning of 18 March 1871, in Montmartre, a group of women and National Guardsmen decided to defend the cannons of the National Guard from being seized by the Versailles troops who had come to requisition them. The arrival of National Guardsmen and the people on the scene caused the troops to fraternise with the insurgents, while the commanders were arrested: see Ross, 1988, p. 22. 27 See Gould, 1995. 28 See De Weerdt and Oukhow, 1971, pp. 32-3. 29 See Rifkin, 1979. Courbet, though, had not proposed the destruction of the column, but its removal to the forecourt of the Invalides. The decision to destroy the column had been taken by the Council of the Commune on 12 April 1871, before Courbet even became a member of the Council. The execution of the Council’s decision was carried out on 16 May 1871, when Courbet had become its President and therefore the painter was found responsible for it: see Raunig, pp. 106-7. 30 Clayson, 2002, p. 322. 31 He would soon marry Berthe-Marie Bachoux, a cousin of Ludovic Lepic’s. Degas would portray her twice, in 1875 and 1877. 32 Clayson, 2002, p. 326. 33 See Sánchez, 1997, p. 41. 34 Degas, 1988, pp. 168-9. 35 Sánchez, 1997, pp. 65-6. 36 See Sánchez, 1997, pp. 11-21. 37 Morisot, 1986, p. 73. 38 Chevalier, 1980, p. 73-4 and pp. 75-9.

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Nord, 2000, p. 14. Nord, 2000, p. 7. 41 Nord, 2000, p. 34. 42 Morisot, 1986, p. 81. 43 See Distel, 1990, pp. 177-93. 44 See Lethève and Gardey, 1967, tome XIV, pp. 59-67. 45 As we know from Second Empire chronicler Ernest Vizetelly, Lepic was the son of a noble d’Empire, the “Colonel, later General Count Lepic, aide-de-camp to the Emperor.” As part of the Emperor’s military household, Count Lepic was until 1859 in command of the Cent-Gardes, the cavalry corps who guarded the Tuileries and attended the Emperor in reviews and reception. The Cent-Gardes also accompanied Napoleon III in the war in Italy in 1859 and would accompany him, and be taken prisoners with him at Sedan in 1870. Count Lepic also exercised for Napoleon III the function of “First Maréchal de Logis” (chief quartermaster) at the court of the Tuileries, then that of Superintendent of the Imperial Palaces. According to Vizetelly, Count Lepic “was a man of great artistic taste (which he transmitted to his son, the painter), learned, moreover, in all questions of furniture, tapestry, and other hangings, and under his direction the private apartments of the Empress became extremely beautiful.” The quartermasters had the function of preparing “apartments for guests, and exercised supervision over the furniture and other appointments of the imperial residences, for which purpose they attended the Court not only at the Tuileries, but also at St. Cloud, Compiègne, and its other places of sojourn.”: Vizetelly 1912, pp. 40-1 and pp. 49-51. Also see Boulenger, 1932, p. 47 and Buchanan, 1997. 46 Lemoisne, 1946, II, p. 198. It is possible that Degas and Lepic might have met before 1870, as in a letter of March 1863, Bazille wrote to his parents that Monet and Lepic were his best friends among the art students in Gleyre’s atelier: quoted in Buchanan, 1997. 47 For the Portrait of Mme de Rutté (1875, oil on canvas, cm 62 x 50, private collection, Zurich) see Degas, 1988, pp. 246-7. 48 See the following artworks by Henner: L’Alsace. Elle attend, 1871, Musée National Jean-Jacques Henner, Paris and the Portrait de Mme Jeantaud, 1875, Musée National de la Ville de Paris. 49 See the discussion of Degas’s monotypes and of the collaboration between Lepic and Degas in Janis, 1967. 50 See my discussion of this topic in Chapter Six. 51 Saint-Arroman, 1876, p. 44. 52 Saint-Arroman, 1876, p. 48. 53 Saint-Arroman, 1876, pp. 79-80. 54 As Lepic wrote, “ (…) j’avais mis tout en œuvre pour obtenir des valeurs pouvant rendre la peinture. N’arrivant pas à ce que je voulais avec les moyens traditionnels ou usités, je lâchai la bride à mon tempérament, je me battis avec l’acide et ma plaque, je mis tout en œuvre pour faire jaillir les effets complets de lumière ou d’ombre. J’organisai un outillage à moi, j’osai me servir d’acide pur, je fis claquer mes vernis. Le sable, le grès, tout me fut bon pour arriver à mes noirs, 40

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mais enfin j’y arrivai.”: Comte Lepic, Comment je devins graveur à l’eau forte. Petite lettre à un ami, in Saint-Arroman, 1876, p. 94 and pp. 101-2. 55 “Je réclame la paternité de l’eau forte mobile, c’est-à-dire le travail d’art qui nous permettra de rompre avec l’usage vulgaire, et la liberté de l’encre et du chiffon qui nous donne de tels résultats. Mais, d’ailleurs, point de monopole, point de secret, point de brevet : je livre mon chiffon à tous les artistes, sans qu’ils aient à le demander, et même à tous les éditeurs de gravure qui me le demanderons”: Comte Lepic, Comment je devins graveur à l’eau forte. Petite lettre à un ami, in Saint-Arroman, 1876, p. 103 and pp. 114-5. Also see Janis, 1967 and Lant, 1993. 56 Comte Lepic, Comment je devins graveur à l’eau forte. Petite lettre à un ami, in Saint-Arroman, 1876, p. 113-4. 57 Janis, 1967. 58 Minder, 1998. 59 Pissarro was the first to sign and number his original etchings in 1879, a practice which became established by the 1890s, when such works had acquired “their new rank though differentiation (the artist signed and numbered each one) and rarefaction (limited editions).” By the turn of the century, as Lant writes, artists’ prints had become luxury art objects which “had completely escaped the industry of printed images, despite their common principles and common origins”: Lant, 1983. Also see Melot, 1979-1980. 60 Woollett and Suchtelen, 2006, p. 3. 61 See Bouillon, 1978. 62 Also see Reed and Shapiro, 1984, p. xliii and Thomson, 1988. 63 Melot, 1979-80. 64 Melot, 2005-2006. 65 Degas, 1947, pp. 51-2. 66 See Pissarro, 1943, pp. 30-1, p. 39, p. 57, p. 149, p. 160, pp. 286-87, p. 289. 67 Pissarro, 1943, pp. 161-3. 68 For a detailed discussion of Le Jour et la Nuit see Douglas Druick and Peter Zegers, “Degas and the Printed Image, 1856-1914,” in Reed and Shapiro, 1984, pp. xxxix-li. 69 Charle, 1998, pp. 12-3. 70 Degas, 1947, pp. 50-9.. 71 See Herbert and Marrinan, for instance. 72 Berhaut, 1978, p. 245 73 See Distel, 1990, pp. 223-29. 74 Degas, 1947, pp. 51-2. 75 Quoted in Reed and Shapiro, 1984, pp. xxxiv-li. 76 Lant, 1983. 77 As Geffroy wrote, “les fragments de l’art Japonais, qui étaient venus ici en feuilles volantes d’estampes, ont été des indications précieuses. Partout, pour qui sait voir aux carrefours des routes il ya des poteaux, des flèches, des doigts tendus qui montrent le chemin. L’aspect limpide, la sérénité lumineuse des estampes japonaises, la construction des paysages, la mise en scène de l’humanité devaient constituer une réalisation significative pour ceux qui voulaient, eux aussi, un

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agrandissement d’espace et une vision neuve et vraie des choses. C’est là une étape dans la conquête de l’univers, une jonction non seulement avec les Japonais, mais avec tout l’Extrême Orient - comme le faisait remarquer Duranty,- avec les Hindous, les Pesans, les Chinois.”: Geffroy, 1922, p. 81. 78 For the topic of Japonisme in nineteenth-century France see Weisberg et al., 1975 and Wichmann, 1999. Also, Degas collected Japanese prints through Tadamasa Hayashi, a businessman and collector of Degas’s works. He had met Hayashi through Philippe Burty. In 1878 Burty arranged an after-dinner demonstration of Japanese painting for the guests at his house. Degas was among those who watched the painter Watanabe Seitei in action. Seitei, who was accompanied by Hayashi, also gave a demonstration of fan painting. On this occasion, according to the Japanese scholar Nobuo Nakatani, Degas learnt the staining, dripping and blurring techniques he would apply in the painting of his fans: Goncourt, 1956; Ives, 1977; Schapiro, 1980; Martensen-Larsen, 1988; Nakatani, 1988; DeVonyar and Kendall, 2007. 79 See Nora, 1973. 80 Letter quoted in Brown, 1990. 81 Degas, 1947, p. 76. 82 See Conway, 2004, on realist singers and caf’ conc’ culture in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century and their relevance for French film of the 1930s. 83 Loyrette, 1991, pp. 353-57. 84 Lant, 1983. 85 Nora, 1973. 86 Parent-Duchâtelet, 1836. 87 Melot, 1979-80. 88 Melot, 1979-80. 89 Sánchez 1997, p. 106. The Communard artists were amnestied and re-integrated only in the mid-1880s. 90 “The price of success for Ottin, as for many other artists, was importunity and dependence.” He received the Légion d’Honneur but always had financial difficulties, an existential condition which was “an accumulation of ironic details”: “an ardent republican, a fighter during the June days of 1848, but working strenuously for and receiving patronage from the empire and then lacing his efforts with financial complaints and bitter imploring.”: Sánchez, 1997, pp. 89-91. 91 Sánchez 1997, pp. 6-7 and p. 25. 92 The sixteen delegates for the painting were: Courbet, Arnaud-Durbec, Bonvin, Corot, Daumier, H. Dubois, Feyen-Perrin, Amand Gautier, Gluck, Héreau, Lançon, Leroux, Manet, Millet, Oulevay, Pichio. The ten representatives for sculpture were: Ottin père, J. Becquet, Chapuy, Dalou, de Blezer, Lagrange, Lindenheer, Moreau-Vauthier, Moulin, Poitevin. For architecture: Boileau fils, Delbrück, Nicolle, Oudinot, Raulin. The six delegates for lithography and engraving were: Bellanger, Bracquemond, Flameng, Gill, Huot and Potney. The ten delegates for the decorative arts were Ottin fils, Aubin, Boudier, Chabert, Chesneau, Fuzier, Meyer, Pottier, Reiber, Riester.

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Sánchez, 1997, p. 139. Sánchez 1997, pp. 119-20. 95 Sánchez 1997, p. 117. 96 Sánchez 1997, pp. 139-41. 97 Sánchez, 1997, p. 141 and p. 147. Closer than the Impressionists to the Fédération’s aims of forming an artists’ syndicate came in 1880 the Société Libre des Artistes Français, but at this date the government no longer opposed associative efforts; the Société des Artistes Indépendants (1884) did not fully engage with the Fédération’s legacy, the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (1890) did: Sánchez, 1997, p. 142. 94

CHAPTER TEN “LEAVE ME ON MY DUNG-HILL”

1. Degas’s fin-de-siècle In this chapter I will examine how Degas, just as many others of his generation that had lived through the année terrible as young republicans, was led by his disappointment with the Third Republic toward a position of anarchism. The two main aspects of Degas’s rejection of the Parisian public sphere, and retreat into his private world, will be discussed: his disaffection for public opinion and his cultural nationalism. The first reason behind Degas’s retreat from the public sphere was linked to the distaste, on the part of Degas and many other artists, for the cult of personality orchestrated by the press, and its attempt to turn the image and works of the artists into commodities of the Parisian society of spectacle. The second relevant aspect of Degas’s anarchistic retreat into a private sphere was his nostalgic nationalism. Degas claimed for himself a Frenchness that was anti-Semitic, anti-Protestant, and of the Montmartrois working class.1 While Degas’s anti-Semitism and anti-Protestantism were fuelled by his life-long financial distress, his increasing discontent with modernity became also a spiritualistic and nostalgic claim for a Frenchness that was Northern and Christian. This Degas, whom Pissarro described as being “nearer to the French Gothic,”2 and who accompanied his friend Albert Bartholomé in nostalgic trips through France, reached a peak of intolerance in the late 1890s, during the Dreyfus Affair. The second and concluding section of this chapter will look at the way Degas cultivated a position of anarchistic refuge, which was more metaphorical than literal: almost a performance, indeed, that Degas acted out in the maison d’artiste at 37 rue Victor-Massé where he lived and worked, between 1890 and 1912, concretising for Degas the anarchistic cult of the individual and its inner world in Parisian fin-de-siècle. Degas’s maison d’artiste, as we will see, was Degas’s last instance of conquest of a self and of a space, the avant-gardism of Degas that has been discussed in this study.

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How do we reconcile the pro-communard and anarcho-socialist Degas of the late 1870s, engaged in collaborative work with Pissarro, Cassatt and others, with the bigot, anti-Semite and anti-Protestant Degas of the late 1890s?3 Was Degas’s republicanism only “transient,” was Degas just a patriot? Was he more nationalist than republican?, as Nord has asked.4 In the 1890s, in the complex climate of French political life after Sedan, Degas was certainly a nationalist and a disillusioned republican. A reminder of the difficulty and doubt that could affect a nineteenth-century observer’s perception and understanding of the peculiarities of French history is clearly viewed in the intellectual journey of one of Degas’s best friends, Ludovic Halévy, an Orleanist who served in the administration of the Second Empire and who, while being thoroughly hostile to universal suffrage, accepted the Third Republic by default, as a “républicain de résignation.”5 In truth, there are no ambiguities in Degas’s position: knowing that anarchism is a variety of nineteenth-century socialism, but not an ideology, Degas’s political ideas, against the backcloth of nineteenth-century French political history, stop appearing illogical and disparate. In the same way, Pissarro’s taste for things English and England in general does not make him a monarchist with a predilection for privilege and aristocratic family lines, or a counter-revolutionary. Indeed, Pissarro the anarchist regarded Britain with sympathy both for the British application of liberalism and individualism, and for the sense of Old World culture that emanated from the Kingdom. This appealed to his ethic and lifestyle as a craftsman, which implied, as in Degas’s case, a disdain for mass society and a certain modern industrial world. Indeed, Degas did not dislike the work ethic and philosophy of communal work and manual artistic work that Pissarro espoused for himself and in the education of his children. In the context of his political engagement, this elitist and moralistic outlook, or ethos of craftsmanship, does not make of Pissarro a reactionary, neither do anti-Dreyfusardism and traditionalism in the case of Degas. These various aspects of seemingly conservative and unideological outlook that marked the work ethic of the Montmartrois artisan and anarchist at the turn of the century tie in well with Degas’s dislike of professional bureaucratic elites, lawyers, engineers, politicians, who put their skills at the disposal of the power and authority of the bourgeois state, the Third Republic.6 However, things could not have changed overnight. Nord himself explains that “the new painters were not detached observers of the history of their times,” and that l’année terrible had shattered the realist movement. The years of the recovery from the Franco-Prussian war and the establishment of the republic proved difficult for France: Frenchmen

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had to acknowledge that the Great Nation was not so great, and, in looking for someone to blame for this, all the weight of the coexistence, in the French public conscience, of many and radically opposed political traditions was suddenly felt. The defeat at Sedan and the loss of AlsaceLorraine catalysed feelings and attitudes of resentful nationalism, the consequences of which would be deeply felt by the world in the decades to come, leading up to the First and Second World Wars, and beyond. In front of the foreign enemy, a cornerstone of the new regime’s politics was to prove France’s cohesion as a nation. To hasten the evacuation of the German troops occupying the Eastern departments of France, the nation strove to pay the war indemnities by national subscriptions of bonds. In September 1873, France having liquidated its debts, the German soldiers left, a year ahead of schedule. By 1875, France had balanced the budget and brought herself back to the forefront of international politics and economy. Despite the internal political difficulties of the Third Republic, France’s recovery from the defeat, her material prosperity and her international position of cultural dominance were celebrated at the 1889 Universal Exhibition, with the unveiling of such an engineering structure as the Eiffel Tower.7 After 1871, French art was affected by the strong nationalism and by the revanchisme brought out by the defeat and loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. Artists had become proudly patriotic.8 Although Degas’s dancers, for instance, are constructions of Parisian-ness, and Cézanne’s landscapes with the Mont Sainte-Victoire are constructions of Provençalisme, both speak, like Puvis de Chavannes’s mural decorations for the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, for a vital identification with France, the motherland.9 Before looking at the way in which the art world resented and reacted to humiliating historic circumstances of defeat and loss, it is worth noting that issues of resentful patriotism weighed heavily on the morale of Degas’s family and acquaintances. In one of the notebooks of these years, and in his effort to understand the recent events, Degas noted the titles of a few publications on the 1870 war, and on the Paris Commune, which appeared in the 1870s. Among these notes, one finds the following: Précis Comparé de la guerre franco-allemande (1872) by Alexandre Lambert; Guerre des Frontières du Rhin (1870-71) of 1871, by Wilhelm F. Rüstow; Paris pendant les deux sièges (1871), by Louis Veuillot and La Défense de Belfort (1871) by Colonel Denfert-Rochereau.10 We can get closer to an understanding of the ways the defeat was perceived in Degas’s social circles through a letter to him from Alfred Niaudet, a friend since the days at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. Degas kept this piece of correspondence all his life. In the letter, dated 7 March 1871, the feeling of wounded French-

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ness and an anti-German attitude of revenge were fully developed. Discussing the sad death of their friend Cuvelier, Niaudet remarked that the dead at least would not feel the shame and grief reserved for the living. He really envied, he wrote, those who would come back from the front with a missing limb, because they would be able to claim that they had really done their duty toward the homeland. These veterans, wrote Niaudet, would carry out the “reparation of our disasters” and “the revenge we have to render our enemies.” Thanking Edgar for informing him that Edgar’s brother, the marine Achille, “had deliberately returned from America in order to fight for France,” Niaudet wrote that “he would not expect anything below that from him,” but noted that, unfortunately, in the war, the French marine had been made to play “a miserable part.” Niaudet also commented on the beginning of the civil upheavals that would soon lead to the establishment of the Commune. It would have been preferable, he guessed, that people keep quiet. But he rejoiced at the idea that, at the risk of their lives, and without a hope, Parisians would show who they are to the enemy, and what the French would have done if they had not been lead “by some traitors” or “malheureux d’une incapacité sans pareille.” As for the Germans, whom he accused of killing innocent peasants by setting their cottages on fire, or assassinating them, Niaudet asked, “what will these monsters called Bismarck, Moltke, William, do? They have endeavoured to spread terror and are the strongest, beyond comparison.”11 Though the cultural dominance of France was firmly established on the international plan by 1889, the country was torn by internal struggles. With the establishment of the Third Republic France was facing the question of the troubled heritage of its political past. In the early years of the Third Republic, democracy was restricted by the regime of Moral Order, under Mac-Mahon (1873-77). The reaction of the Republicans brought the election of Léon Gambetta as president of the Chamber of Deputies. But the installation of a truly republican regime was not straightforward. It was, according to historian Michel Winock, “the fruit of a compromise” between Left- and Right-wing parties. In 1875, a few Bonapartist deputies had been elected to the Chamber. As a reaction to the possibility of a restoration of the Empire, the Orleanist deputies agreed to support Gambetta’s Republicans, who were otherwise in the minority, and vote for the Republican Constitution at the Assemblée Nationale. In exchange for political support from the Orleanist party, Gambetta instituted the Senate, and a presidency mandate of seven years. The consolidation of the republican regime came in 1877, when Gambetta’s Republicans took the absolute majority of seats in the Assemblée Nationale.12 Gambetta’s first informal celebration of the 14 July, in 1879,

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led to the date becoming the national celebration in 1880. France was given a flag and its national anthem, while schools were charged with the education of Frenchmen in the cult of the nation that one day would be avenged: “l’armée était populaire, la Revanche était dans les têtes: il fallait, selon Gambetta, n’en parler jamais et y penser toujours.” For Gambetta, France could be united only in this association of esprit civil and esprit militaire, a sacred unity and strength of the nation in the face of the foreign enemy, Germany, as had been in 1870, and as would be in July 1914. Between these dates, French internal politics offered no united front. The more extreme nationalists, both on the Left and on the Right, compared the industrialised and urbanised republican France that had risen from the Franco-Prussian conflict to the Roman Empire in its declining phase. They blamed Jews, Protestants, and Freemasons for what they saw as the immorality and degeneration of the social and economic life of the country.13 One did not have to be an extreme nationalist to believe in the decadence of France: to return as close as possible to Degas, Pissarro was himself convinced that “France is sick” from “constant change.”14 And yet, Pissarro stands in contrast to Degas as the image of the progressive artist to that of the reactionary. The Dreyfus Affair is considered by many a crucial phase in French modern political history: for Winock, it was at the end of the 1890s, at the outbreak of the Dreyfus Affair that it became possible to tell the progressive attitude from the reactionary. It was only then that the “good French,” who worshipped at the cult of the army and the nation, clearly rose to stand against those whom they considered responsible for the corruption and decadence of the country, the “antiFrench,” Jews, Protestants and Freemasons.15 The Dreyfus Affair, however, was only one, albeit, significant aspect of anti-Semitism in France, and it would be both misplaced and anachronistic to attribute to Degas’s anti-Dreyfusard ruminations the violence and sadism that characterised contemporary Russian anti-Semitism, or twentieth-century racial anti-Semitism. We know of Degas’s resentment of Jewish high finance, which derived loosely from leftist thinkers such as Proudhon, Saint-Simon, and Marx, and expressed itself explicitly, for instance, on the subject of Ernest May, or Isaac de Camondo. Degas expressed himself also with regard to the Jewish workers from Eastern Europe settling in Paris, especially in Montmartre and in the Marais, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Elie Halévy noted in his diary a breakfast with Degas and Meilhac, on March 10, 1885: Ce matin à déjeuner nous avons eu M. Degas. Il a crié contre l’installation des Delacroix, contre l’invasion des juifs allemands…Meilhac, tout fier de

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ce petit cercle rouge qui étincelle à sa boutonnière, bien persuadé que son bel habit vert ne vaut pas la rosette.16

Nancy Green has written that anti-Semitism, as a defining feature of certain constructions of Christianity, did exist in late nineteenth-century France, and it cannot certainly be restricted to the Dreyfus Affair and to Drumont’s La Libre Parole. The arrival en masse of Eastern European proletarians, mainly craftsmen in the needle trades, attracted by the abundance of work in the Parisian fashion industry, did generate pessimism in sections of French society, with regard to the threat posed by these new social and political forces flowing westward, in search of work. But France was not perceived as a land of deep-seated anti-Semitism. On the contrary, France appealed to Jews as the country of Jewish emancipation, and for many it became the refuge from Tsarist pogroms and from the struggle for life and work in the Pale of Settlement. Green says that when compared to contemporary Russian anti-Semitism, in spite of the polemics of Drumont and his friends, French anti-Semitism was neither as violent, as strongly endorsed officially, nor expressed in the same economic forms as it was in eastern Europe.17

As we have seen, Degas’s anti-Semitic outbursts are inexcusable, but, importantly, they often feature within a broader backdrop of utterances proffered against instances of state authority and power in general. The socio-economic character of Jewish immigration to France, and Paris in particular, exerted pressure on the nationalism that had been asserting itself in the country after the Franco-Prussian war. This nationalism could take an anti-Semitic turn when “couched in terms of defense of the French worker or merchant supposedly displaced by these immigrants.”18 The arrival and existence of a Jewish proletariat in France was, for the French socialists, “a crucial argument to help unbalance the former anti-capitalist equals anti-Jewish equation,” but for the anti-Semites, “it meant that Jewish capitalists monopolizing the wealth of France were now seconded by Jewish workers taking jobs from French workers.”19 There was also another aspect to the reception of the Jewish proletariat in French society and public opinion: “the vision of Eastern European immigrants as carriers of revolution.”20 Along with clothing artisans, and Russian students, a few political revolutionaries came to Paris, forming revolutionary circles, whether anarchist, anarcho-communist, or, later, Bolshevik, all under police supervision. This is especially true of the decade before 1917, but Peter Lavrov had arrived in Paris in 1876. In the 1880s, he would receive every Thursday, in his apartment in the rue Saint-Jacques, a group of Russian refugees.21 Famously, Lavrov worried Renoir, though, not

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Degas.22 The political ambiguities and contradictions of the Belle Epoque are to be seen at work in the lives of French artists. Mary Cullinane, for instance, has described the fin-de-siècle dandyism and decadent aestheticism, evident in Symbolist literary circles, and in such intellectuals as Joris-Karl Huysmans, as a pessimistic reaction to modernity and “vulgar democracy.” It was, for many intellectuals, a desire “to distance oneself from the common horde,” to retreat “from society and its crowds and from all things commonplace,” in order to retain a “sense of individuality” and cultivate “a consciousness of their own.”23 Degas was close to literary Symbolist circles, especially critics such as Gustave Geffroy and Octave Mirbeau. Most of all, Degas was among the many disappointed and pessimist artists who wished to distance themselves from the aspects of vulgarisation and materialistic mass culture of French public life. The year 1886 saw the last Impressionist exhibition, the appearance of neo-Impressionism and Symbolism, and the publication of Drumont’s book, La France Juive. It all happened against the background of the economic depression that had begun in 1882, and of the political scandals in which many republican leaders of the nation were involved. In their retreat from public focus, the Impressionists abandoned both the Salon and the boulevard shows to embrace the private spaces of dealer-sponsored ventures, conceived for a small and truly interested public: it was “relocation,” to use Martha Ward’s term.24 It was not the end of their avant-gardism, however. Degas, and others retreated to more complex and more remote positions of a no less engaged and oppositional alienation. In the case of writers and artists, there was a peculiar tension in this circumstance. While, as Nicholas Green has written, the Third Republic encouraged artists’ individualism,25 artists felt that they were under siege by a cult of personality manipulated by the Parisian critics. Such cult of the creative personality escaped the control of the artists themselves and had the sole aim of feeding their lives to the masses. Charle has written about fin-de-siècle Paris as the “temps des hommes doubles.” Authors and artists were now aware that their career no longer depended on accessing the public, but on a more important ability to filter their public image through mediators acting between the public and the growing number of works on offer.26 The proliferation of critics and their growing power are characteristics of fin-de-siècle Paris. Their influence put in vogue the journalistic practice of “mise en scène de la vie littéraire elle même, comme s’il s’agissait d’un spectacle public,” which made of the 1890s the decade of the theatricalisation of Parisian cultural life. It became a “mise en scène permanente de la vie littéraire et intellectuelle,” through the diffusion of such journalistic genres as interviews, surveys, and biographical

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writings. Critics, however, were not the only “hommes doubles,” because in a modern society, where social roles and internal distinctions multiply themselves, everyone was a “homme double.” Creators were no longer in control of their reputation, and while an intellectual class emerged, they had to choose between “exigences privées” and “contraintes publiques.” The “aliénation spécifique” of the end of the nineteenth century derived from the multiplication of roles implied by the presence of “hommes doubles,” from whose judgment creators cannot subtract themselves: “Les maudire serait se maudire soi-même. Les repousser serait refuser l’avenir et le voeu secret de tout créateur, la survie post mortem.” According to Charle, the obsession of certain authors with such themes as prostitution, suicide, or the double, originates in the perception of the “psychologie schizofrénique” imposed by the acceptance of the power of the “double hommes,” and in the temptation to double oneself in order to exist.27 In this run away from publicity, a double image of the creator was bound to rise. The double image of Degas, in which a good, private Degas fond of his friends and dear to them, is contrasted to the mean, public Degas, a misanthrope, and a misogynist (a double image discussed in the introduction to this study), is explained by the Parisian fin-de-siècle alienation, as he, like other artists, retreated into a private world and shunned officialdom. Richard Kendall, in his Degas: Beyond Impressionism (1996), wanted to redress “the legend of the ageing artist,” his “crusty behaviour and hermit-like withdrawal from society,” his “reluctance to exhibit,” “terrible decline in eyesight, a violent misogyny and a dislike of all things modern.”28 I argue that this legend does not need redressing. Degas and his contemporaries were fully aware that the private Degas implied, as its paired and opposite term, the public Degas. On the one hand, there was the private Degas who saw his friends as usual, until the Dreyfus Affair led him to review his friendships. On the other hand, there was the public Degas, who disliked the press, or at least a certain section of the press, the gossiping press. Both Degas and the critics who wished to write about him were aware of the tensions created by the Parisian “société du spectacle” in the split image of the artist. Degas needed to control his public image, which he did effectively, as in the case of his relationship with the Irish writer and journalist George Moore. In 1890, writing “Degas: the Painter of Modern Life” for The Magazine of Art, Moore reported that To those who want to write about him, he says, “Leave me alone; you didn’t come here to count how many shirts I have in my wardrobe?” “No, but your art, I want to write about it.” “My art, what do you want to say about it? Do you think you can explain the merits of a picture to those who

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Chapter Ten do not see them? Dites… I can find the best and clearest words to explain my meaning, and I have spoken to the most intelligent people about art, and they have not understood-to B-for instance; when as among people who understand words are not necessary, you say- humph, he, ha, and everything has been said. My opinion has always been the same. I think that literature has only done harm to art. You puff out the artist with vanity, you inculcate the taste for notoriety, and that is all; you do not advance public taste by one jot…Notwithstanding all your scribbling it never was in a worse state than it is at present…Dites? You do not even help us to sell our pictures. A man buys a picture not because he read an article in a newspaper, but because a friend, who he thinks knows something about pictures, told him it would be worth twice as much ten years hence as it is worth today…Dites?”29

Degas did not like Moore’s article: it reported that nearly compromised the painter’s long friendship with Whistler.30 But most of all Moore’s article revealed that the financial situation of Degas’s family was not so rosy.31 Offended in his concern not to raise the issue of his social origins, Degas stopped talking to Moore, and the two never saw each other again.32 Degas preferred to choose his critics in order to better control the reception accorded his name. In doing this, Degas had no misunderstandings with such critics of the Symbolist school as Geffroy, who looked at the only essential reality, the artworks and the “choses de l’esprit.”33 In December 1890, Geffroy published an article titled “Degas” in L’Art dans les Deux Mondes. It began with the following words: Degas va encore déclarer qu’on pourrait le laisser tranquille et que ses œuvres peuvent fort bien se passer des commentaires de la critique; alors que ce sont les artistes tels que lui qui ne nous laissent pas tranquilles et qui nous prennent notre temps et notre admiration.

Complying with Degas’s wish to look not at the artist’s biography, Geffroy declared that: On peut commencer par supprimer toute biographie, on peut éviter de rechercher dans les vieux catalogues quelles peintures ont été autrefois reçues aux Salons annuels. Je ne veux retenir de l’œuvre à laquelle je songe en ce moment, que des renseignements d’intellect. Il n’est rien d’intéressant en dehors des choses de l’esprit, des histoires d’idées, des manières d’être cérébrales.

Instead of a biography, Geffroy, for whom Degas was a “cérébral” and a painter of the woman “qui ne se sait pas regardée,” provided the reader with an unambiguous portrait of Degas as a “double homme”:

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L’homme est mystérieux et narquois, verrouille sa porte, affiche un dédain absolu pour la discussion publique. Il s’est fait deux existences:- l’une est l’existence d’un passant très fureteur et très gai, circulant avec des sourires qui illusionnent et des mots qui éclatent, au milieu des manifestations sociales et artistiques,- l’autre est l’existence d’un reclus, enfermé avec des modèles et des croquis, s’acharnant aux conjonctions des tons et aux combinaisons imprévues des lignes.34

Degas’s attempt to control his public image and the reception of his works required just this peculiar attitude towards the press. He proclaimed his hate for medals and other forms of public recognition, as on the occasion of the exhibition of the Caillebotte Bequest (which included seven works by Degas) at the Musée du Luxembourg.35 Degas’s need to manage his own public image and the accessibility of his works also required that he select the venues and modalities for the exhibition of his art. As he wrote to Aglaüs Bouvenne in 1891, “I insist on all occasions to appear, as far as possible, in the form and with the accessories that I like.”36 It is now time to discuss in detail the peculiar nationalism attached to the manner in which Degas managed his escape from the public focus into a private domain, both through a divorce from publicity and spectacle, and through a self-fashioning selection of his own critics. Above all, in his self-fashioning enterprise, Degas was careful to preserve and assert his French-ness. To Octave Maus, who invited him to exhibit at the Salon de la Libre Esthétique in Brussels, Degas replied, in December 1888, that he refused, explaining that “I have too many reasons for staying away and I have a fancy that I cannot overcome to confine myself to this country.”37 While externally Degas peremptorily clung to France and to French-ness, internally this notion required a specification as to exactly what Frenchness the individual Degas was claiming for himself. In effect, Degas, in Paris, pursued the fame of a private, mysterious artist, secluded in a studio where he worked not for the public but for the circle of amateurs and collectors served by his art dealer Durand-Ruel. Accordingly, Degas did not wish to show in the official venues of nineteenth-century mass culture, such as the 1900 Universal Exhibition.38 It was in Durand-Ruel’s gallery that Degas chose to hold the only one-man shows in his lifetime, in 1892 and in 1894. In both occasions, in accord with his fame as an individualistic artist practising his own Symbolism, and in retreat from public life, Degas exhibited a series of landscapes, works that were truly elusive because they were both a rare theme in his oeuvre and Symbolist in essence. In 1892, the twentysix landscape monotypes, exhibited at Durand-Ruel’s, were reviewed in the Mercure de France by Rémy de Gourmont, who described them as “sites heureusement chimériques,

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recomposés d’imagination, un peu à la manière de Corot.”39 In 1894, Degas exhibited another group of landscapes at Durand-Ruel’s. Howard Lay has linked Degas’s landscape monotypes to “the artist’s visionary capacities, a typical Symbolist attitude,” which in the field of painting was articulated, among others, by Gauguin, Denis, and Redon, and in the literary field by Mallarmé, Octave Mirbeau, Camille Mauclair, Valéry, who were all very close to Degas.40 This Symbolist and alienated Degas working for a restricted public was more than ever an avant-garde and oppositional figure. According to Malcolm Miles, avant-gardism survived “in more covert ways in some areas of Impressionism.” Social criticism continued to be made and took divergent directions: “the alienation in Manet’s late work and later in the Symbolist’s retreat to a world in which the artist’s psyche become art’s subject matter,” and “the renewal of utopian aspirations in neo-Impressionism.” In the first case, “a refusal of everyday life in Symbolism and Decadence is, in its way, a refusal of bourgeois society, though at times given to a regressive aspect, harking back to medievalism and aristocracy,” while in Neo-Impressionism a new, forward-looking vision was encountered, as in Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières.41 Both were avant-garde positions but while Neo-Impressionism, as Ward has written, required a public and historic space, a few of the Impressionists, and among them Degas, chose the Symbolist way of individualism and private space in a challenge to publicity, mass culture, and commoditisation.42 Degas’s nationalism was not political but cultural, and I rely here on the articulation of the difference between the two as made by John Hutchinson. While political nationalism is generally aggressive and aims “at the establishment of an independent nation state,” cultural nationalism is defensive and has intellectual and historicist origins. Its aim is “the formation of national communities,” often “a moral community,” and can “take the form of ethno-historic ‘revivals’ that promote a national language, literature and the arts, educational activities and economic self-help.” As Hutchinson writes, the primary goal of cultural nationalism is not to seize state power but to “define and revise the content of the nation that the state nominally serves and to rebalance state and community,” crystallising “as a reaction against state centralization.”43 Within this definition of cultural nationalism find a place Degas’s Montmartrois anarchism and anti-capitalism, along with his nostalgia for a lost Christian spiritualism. Indeed, besides the manipulation of notions of French-ness, a second aspect of the cultural nationalism that tinged Degas’s fin de-siècle retreat into a private world of feminine nature was a nostalgic Christian spiritualism in which Degas’s anti-Semitism/antiDreyfusardism could easily be assimilated. The mid-1890s were the

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crucial existential divide in Degas’s life: his brother Achille died in 1893, Paul Valpinçon in 1894 and Berthe Morisot in 1895, the year that also took his sister Marguerite. Evariste de Valernes died in 1896, Mallarmé and Moreau in 1898. While death took away his family and friends, the Dreyfus Affair started, leaving a trail of breakups and separations. In 1897, during the Dreyfus Affair, the Degas who had for thirty years frequented the house of his friends Louise and Ludovic Halévy, dining every Monday with them, and attending their Thursday evening salon, simply interrupted their friendship with a short written note.44 The Halévys were dreyfusards, and their children Daniel and Elie were engaged in petitions and movements in support of Dreyfus. To have dinner with them had become unbearable for Degas. Ludovic, not a Jew but a dreyfusard, suffered psychologically from the effects the Dreyfus Affair had on the country as a whole, and on his life. Nevertheless, Degas ignored this, and didn’t see him again until 1906, two years before Halévy’s death.45 Degas also stopped seeing Halévy’s cousin, Geneviève Straus. The widow of Georges Bizet, Geneviève had married Emile Straus, and artists, writers, actors, singers, poets, aristocrats, and musicians frequented her salons in the boulevard Haussmann, in the 1880s and 1890s, described by Daniel Halévy.46 Geneviève was a cultivated, witty, and cosmopolitan salonarde, whose charm in part derived from a life-long melancholy that run in the family, and formed the basis for the Halévys’ association with the two doctors Blanche, father and son, who treated them in their sanatorium at Passy. Geneviève was revered by her guests and acquaintances. She posed for painters, and inspired Marcel Proust’s for the character of the duchesse de Guermantes in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Degas had asked her permission to watch her let down her long hair, and she asked him to accompany her to a fashionable dressmaker for the fitting of an outfit, as he recounted in a letter to a friend.47 In the 1880s Degas had been especially close to the Halévys and to Geneviève Straus, but through Geneviève, he also kept company with Mme Howland, and with such fin-de-siècle aesthetes and society figures as Charles Haas, Charles Ephrussi, Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, and Albert Boulanger-Cavé, who mixed with writers such as Huysmans and painters such as Whistler, Sickert, and Moreau. At the moment of the Dreyfus Affair, Geneviève’s salon broke off, and Degas severed relationships with any dreyfusard he knew. The refined environment and the friendships evoked by Degas in his 1885 pastel portrait of his Six Friends at Dieppe (Fig. 10-1) were thus shattered.48 Forain and Degas, to Mme Straus’s grief, left her.49 Degas’s behaviour in this circumstance was not more eccentric than that of others: during the Dreyfus Affair, France

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was torn apaart: families, friendships, reelationships, ccareers were destroyed d for or againnst Dreyfus.50 Proust, Danieel’s friend andd schoolmate, was also engaged in petitions in suupport of Dreeyfus, and forr this reason his h father stopped talkking to him foor a time. In the last decadde of the cen ntury, and before the Dreyfus Afffair, Degas expressed e hiss particular brand of patriotism by being photoographed whille reading Druumont’s newspaper, La Libre Parolee. However, Degas D also exp pressed his paatriotism in th he form of nostalgic trrips through France, in particular wiith his frien nd Albert Bartholomé,, a painter whhom the death h of his wife in the late 1880s had turned into a sculptor off funerary mo onuments. Linnked to the cu ult of the dead, Barthoolomé’s art was, w according g to Léonce B Bénédite, “un ne oeuvre toute spirituualiste de connsolation et de d réconfort.” Through its archaism and its “naaturalisme déllicat et expreessif,” Barthoolomé’s art sought s to express the same mysticiism of the “m maîtres primitiifs des pays du d Nord.” Bartholomé traveled exteensively to museums and ccathedrals in search of the sources for a renewall of French scculpture in itss “traditions ethniques, e traditions sseptentrionalees et chrétieennes.”51 Pis sarro, who abhorred mysticism, ppraised this kind k of realism m of Bartholoomé’s works, which he related to D Degas’s teachiings. Having seen an exhibbition of sculptures by Bartholomé and Rodin at Durand Ruel’s R galleryy in Decemb ber 1890, Pissarro wroote about them m to Lucien:

Fig. 10-1 Six Friends at Dieppe 1885, pastel oon wove paper laid down on cannvas, cm 114.9 x 71.1, Museum m of Art, Rh hode Island Schoool of Design, Providence.

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The figures by Bartholomé are first rate, among these there is a wax bust which is at once extremely modern and very primitive; it has great nobleness, one feels that the artist is a pupil of Degas. Very remarkable, too, is a large piece which seems to be for a tomb: a young man, a young woman and a dead child; it is truly poignant…

As Pissarro added, he found Bartholomé’s figures to be “far stronger than anything by Rodin, whose works become petty and facile beside it.”52 Modern and primitive at once, as Pissarro aptly described it, was the sensibility that permeated Degas and Bartholomé’s quest for the roots of French art in an anti-classical, non-Latin, but Christian and Northern spiritualism, of which they were the modern exponents. In their search for a Northern and Christian France, in October 1890, Degas and Bartholomé went on a trip to Burgundy. They planned to reach in a horse-drawn carriage their friends the Jeanniots, living at Diénay in the Côte d’Or. Their friend Michel Manzi met them at Melun in a coupé, and Forain met them, a bit further away, on a tricycle. Along the way, Degas and Bartholomé stopped at country inns to sleep, and ate the food of deep France, reporting their experiences in daily letters to the Halévys in Paris. It was a political statement to travel pulled by a white horse in the era of automobiles. The trip lasted two weeks and the two made numerous stops. But how should we consider the fact that Plumaire, the horse, had been stripe-painted in black and white? Degas said that they wanted to startle the peasants.53 This desire to add a touch of magic to the business of their journey through old France is a sign of the two travellers’ pursuit of something that was at once serious and playful, a modern performance that is almost unthinkable outside the Paris culture of the cabarets artistiques. Bartholomé and Degas went together on two other nostalgic trips: they went to the pilgrimage site of Lourdes, and in 1898 they went to Montauban to visit the Musée Ingres. Degas and Bartholomé shared a taste for the supposed spirituality and pureness of the Primitives, a denomination that now included the Flemish and Florentine artists of before the Renaissance, as well as Ingres.54 Their visit to Montauban, the birthplace of Ingres, must be viewed in the context of their turn-of-thecentury ingrisme, a primitivist revival that affected Degas and Bartholomé. The two friends also jointly bought artworks by Ingres at auctions.55 Degas’s nostalgic longing for a primitive style with spiritual connotations extended beyond the borders of France. In 1889, Degas went to Spain with the Italian painter Giovanni Boldini. Degas was hoping to visit a brothel in Andalusia, though the trip was motivated by a search for aesthetic spiritualism in the art of a country which, in the theory and history of art of Georges Sorel and his followers, was then associated with a fervent

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Catholicism, apparent, for instance, in the works of El Greco.56 Degas’s trip to Spain and his contemporary interest in El Greco’s artworks, some of which he acquired for his planned museum, must be seen as another instance of Degas’s nostalgic aesthetic spiritualism of the 1890s. It is in Valéry’s Degas Dance Dessin that we find a description of both Degas’s anarchistic dislike for rationality, and of his kind of resistance to a certain modernity. Degas hated bourgeois professionals, thinkers, “Les réformateurs, les rationalistes, les hommes «de justice et de vérité», les abstracteurs, les critiquent d’art…,” and architects : Il attribuait aux penseurs et aux architectes la plupart des maux dont l’époque est atteinte. On vit d’ailleurs en ce temps-là (vers 1890), se prononcer chez quelques esprits distingués un sentiment de réaction contre le moderne et ses théoricien, Un positivisme empirique parut, qui, loin de partir comme l’autre, d’une table rase, invoqua l’expérience, non celle des laboratoires, mais, plus simplement et tout bonnement, celle des siècles. La somme des siècles répond ce que l’on veut. On s’éprit de l’artisan du moyen âge, et quelques peintres ou sculpteurs se costumèrent comme lui. Le nom de tradition fut prononcé. Certains furent conduits par leur zèle pour le passé jusqu’au pied des autels qu’ils avaient fort négligé depuis l’enfance; plusieurs jusque dans le cloître. D’autres demeurèrent païens, ne prenant dans la tradition que ce qui leur plaisait. Divers que j’ai connus, d’âme toute anarchiste, plaçaient Louis XIV au- dessus de tout.57

This leads us to consider, in the next and concluding section, how, in the last decade of the century Degas chose to retreat into the private space of his maison d’artiste, a refuge that was consistent with his attitude and role at the forefront of the Impressionist avant-garde.58

2. Maison d’artiste In 1890 Degas left his studio at 19 rue Fontaine and found a new studio on the fourth floor of a building in the rue Victor-Massé. In 1897, Degas was able to leave his flat on the rue Ballu, and to rent the third and the second floors to house his apartment and his art collection in the same building. The life and the works were thus joined: he lived surrounded by his own work, and by that of his friends that he owned, and by the artworks he was often buying at auctions in the 1890s. Paul Lafond has described the place: the studio on the fourth floor was a chaotic worksite, while the apartment at the third floor was furnished with old family furniture accommodating books, boxes of artworks, plaster casts of hands, Neapolitan pupazzi, and a papier-mâché elephant. Here were found the artworks of artist and friends such as Rouart, Lepic, Forain, Bartholomé,

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Jeanniot, Paulin, interspersed with works by Ingres, Delacroix, and Manet. Hanging in Degas’s bedroom was his own double portrait of his father Auguste with the guitarist Pagans, a portrait of Degas as a child, and two small views of Italy by Corot. The second floor housed Degas’s art gallery, which Gary Tinterow has defined as “his unofficial and very private museum.”59 It was a huge, unfurnished room, filled with artworks sitting on easels or facing the walls: works by El Greco, Ingres’s portraits of Mr and Mme Leblanc, bought in 1896, of the Marquis de Pastoret and of Mr de Norvins, besides a little Roger Délivrant Angélique; there were Delacroix’s Baron Schwiter, Courbet’s Portrait d’Homme, a few landscapes by Corot, and canvases by Manet; a Head of a Woman by Renoir, and works by Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. Here Lafond saw Degas’s collection of walking sticks.60 This was his collection, a small, “unfamiliar” collection, “made by a relatively poor man, and not at all on the princely scale of the American financiers,” as Roger Fry wrote for The Burlington Magazine a few days before the sale of the Degas estate in 1918, following the painter’s death. As Fry noted, Degas’s collection showed two motives: “one, friendly, personal feeling towards artists whom Degas knew, and this accounts for certain secondary works; and two, Degas’s insatiable and pure love of the highest artistic quality.” This had made him acquire El Greco’s S. Ildefonso writing under the Dictation of the Virgin, hardly “an important or ambitious work,” Fry wrote, but one that revealed more than many others ”his singular powers of design.” In Corot’s oeuvre, Degas favoured the “austerely planned” and “architecturally constructed” Pont de Limay. The Ingres were “all of the fresh and most uncompromising kind,” while the presence of Delacroix’s Baron Schwiter made Fry comment: The portrait of Baron de Schwiter throws an entirely new light on Delacroix’s genius. I confess I found it hard to understand the enthusiasm of almost all great French painters for Delacroix, but this portrait makes me suspect that underlying what appears to us the tiresome romantic rhetoric of Delacroix’s designs there must be the same qualities which are here manifest enough.

In his disregard for “the catchwords of the schools and the quarrels of contemporary critics,” Degas had put together a collection that included Perronneau, Gauguin, and Van Gogh.61 According to Loyrette, in this “museum” an “amiable disorder” prevailed, and through “the picturesque jumble of Degas’s own arrangement,” Degas put together “unexpected groupings and above all willingly mixed his own works with those of his contemporaries or earlier artists.” The aim of this collection, in which

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Degas gave ample space to the work of other artists, was that “it should surround and accompany his works.” For Loyrette, Ingres and Delacroix “would introduce Degas himself,” making it clear that he considered himself “the restorer of Ingres’s heritage, but that he equally had a place for Delacroix.” Insofar as he showed himself to be the artist that could reconcile the opposition thought to exist between the two masters, Degas’s collection was at once “autobiographical and polemical.”62 Degas’s private art collection raises the question of the personal museum that he for a time intended to found, as we know from Berthe Morisot and Daniel Halévy, among others. In a letter to her daughter Julie Manet, written a few hours before her death in March 1895, Berthe incited Julie to “Tell Degas that if he founds a museum, he must choose a Manet” (from her collection, she meant). According to Halévy, a year later, in January 1896, Degas was thinking instead of donating to the State the two portraits by Ingres of Mme and Mr Leblanc, which Degas had just purchased at auction. As Halévy recorded in his diary, Degas, who wouldn’t stop telling “the tale of the purchase,” announced the following intention: “Yes, I shall give the Ingres portraits to my country; and then I shall go and sit in front of them and look at them and think about what a noble deed I have done.” A few days later, Halévy noted that Degas had stayed after dinner to talk about “his picture gallery” and the complaints of his maid who demands blue aprons because her master buys Ingres. Roaring with laughter he tells us of his quarrels with her. And still laughing he leans back in his chair and suddenly he says: “To have no clothes and to own sublime objects-that will be my chic!”63

Modern scholars agree that between 1895 and 1900 Degas thought of, and talked about, establishing a museum based on the art collection that he was building up, in the same years, while keeping his maid and himself on a tight budget.64 We also know that until 1904 he took extensive notes about the history of the artworks he owned.65 Degas had been collecting intensely between 1894 and 1900, and even trying to acquire Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio, unsuccessfully bidding at an auction in 1897. Why did he abandon his personal museum project? In his 1991 biography of Degas, Loyrette suggested that the museum project had probably been “just a fantasy.”66 In an article of 1998, Loyrette gave a series of reasons behind Degas’s idea of a museum,67 but did not provide an explanation for his change of mind, limiting himself to describe the trauma of moving to another flat in 1912 and the “uncertain geography, with shifting frontiers” of Degas’s collection, which included the walking sticks, rugs, plaster

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casts, dolls, handkerchiefs, and headdresses he was fond of in the 188090s. In fact, for Loyrette, any notion of a core collection within defined contours gave way to an accumulation of works of all kinds: family souvenirs, the gifts of artist friends, engravings and photographs, masterpieces put together by an informed and passionate collector, bargains picked up at brocanteurs; in short, the inevitable detritus of a lifetime.68

I am inclined to think that Degas never had clear intentions about founding an official personal museum, or donating artworks to the French State. It was a fantasy. However, I also believe that the disorderly room at the second floor of 37 rue Victor Massé, did constitute the museum in Degas’s maison d’artiste at 37 rue Victor-Massé. For as long as it existed, and for as long as Degas occupied its three floors, the building was in its arrangement a total work of art that in Degas’s intention should account for the fact that art had been his life, that he identified life and work, that they were one. While nothing came of Degas’s idea of an official personal museum, Degas did realise his maison d’artiste. The Parisian landmark at 37 rue Victor-Massé, which exposed his ideal of art as an arrangement encompassing life and work, did exist and was lived by Degas as his maison d’artiste, until it was literally dissolved. The building had to be demolished, and in 1912 Degas, forced to abandon the rue Victor-Massé, where he was a tenant, moved to an apartment in the boulevard de Clichy.69 His niece Jeanne Fevre, who took care of him during his last years, wrote that “in this new building, Degas no longer wished to create an interior space for himself.”70 In February 1916 Degas compiled a will by which he left all his property to his natural heirs. I argue that it was exactly through the quality of individualism, highlighted by Loyrette’s description of Degas’s private collection as a chaotic ensemble of artworks, personal souvenirs, and disparate objects that he collected, that his maison d’artiste constituted in Degas’s mind a whole and a landmark in Paris. This quality of individualism mattered to Degas and was asserted by him in his decision to pursue not a personal and official museum, but his own maison d’artiste, which also included his own museum. As I have discussed in the introduction, Degas had not liked the way the French State had arranged the Musée Gustave Moreau, in disregard of the artist’s will. Such risk of being betrayed by the despised officialdom, or by posterity, certainly also played a part in dissuading Degas from pursuing any project that might entail dealings with the administration. Therefore, I will conclude this last chapter of mapping of Degas as a bohemian and nonclassicist artist by making two points about his maison d’artiste. Firstly, it

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suited Degas’s fin-de-siècle attitude of opposition to officialdom that his maison d’artiste should not turn into a permanent and official Parisian landmark. Secondly, the arrangement at 37 rue Victor Massé, for as long as it existed, was not merely the site of Degas’s private museum, but was more than that, it was his maison d’artiste, an installation that included his atelier, his apartment, and his museum. It should be considered as one of his artworks insofar as it was a studied installation encompassing his life and work. Degas had struggled to make that work come true. According to Tinterow, Degas in the 1890s was “an affluent confirmed bachelor moving into a three-floor apartment that was enormous but necessary for his growing collection of works by French masters old and new.”71 This is a misleading summarisation if we keep in mind the requests for money that Degas kept sending to Durand-Ruel well into the twentieth century, money he needed to pay rent, for instance, or to buy artworks.72 Furthermore, Tinterow’s description of a finally embourgeoisé Degas, simply concerned with accommodating his valuable collection, does not stand to the test of such first-hand descriptions of Degas’s eccentricity as those by Vollard and Durand-Ruel that the art dealer René Gimpel recorded in his diary. Durand-Ruel said it clearly enough: All his life Degas was a bohemian; his meals consisted of an egg or two and some milk. Every morning he would give his maid five francs for meals for both of them. “He spent nothing,” added Durand-Ruel. “Several times, however, he owed my father 200,000 or 300,000 francs, because he was building up a collection. He was often swindled.” I can scarcely credit this statement of Durand Ruel’s, as his sale proved him to have been a great connoisseur. “In order to get our money back,” continued DurandRuel, “we bought pastels from him; for one of them he made us pay 100,000 francs.” Several of his sculptures were discovered in an old grand piano given to his parents on their marriage; he had removed the strings to make more room, but it wasn’t a safe place, as some drawings that Forain had given him were found covered in mold.73

This Degas, who was not concerned with preserving artworks, could also be aggressive. Gimpel recorded in his diary Vollard’s story that, on one occasion, Degas had to move and was livid about it. I went around out of kindness, to help him. As I arrived, he was laying his pastels out in a pile on the parquet. ‘Careful,’ I told him, ‘you are going to damage them. You ought to put damaged paper over each canvas and fix it to the back with drawing pins.’ By way of answer, Degas started pitching into the stretchers with tremendous kicks, pushing them back and back till he smashed them against the wall in a frightful cloud of pastel and dust.74

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The only way to reconcile the Degas that borrowed money from DurandRuel to be able to buy artworks with the Degas who destroyed his own artworks is a Degas who was not concerned by the individual fate of works, but by how they could be reabsorbed into a larger work, his maison d’artiste. In the retreat of his atelier, surrounded by the cabarets of Montmartre, Degas kept painting and sculpting dancers, horses, and bathers. In a letter of 12 March 1910 to Alexis Rouart, who was staying in San Remo, Degas wrote Non, mon cher ami, je ne suis plus de ces artistes qui courent à la frontière italienne. On reste dans une humidité en face du Bal Tabarin. Vous allez rentrer bientôt dans nos eaux. Je n’en finis pas avec ma sacrée sculpture.75

He repeated his subjects obsessively, and according to Vollard, Degas’s use of tracing paper to multiply his drawings was a means of perpetual self-correction: “ces corrections, Degas les faisait en recommençant son nouveau dessin en dehors du premier trait. Ainsi, de correction en correction, il arrivait qu’un nu, pas plus grand que la main, était conduit jusqu’à la grandeur nature pour être, en fin de compte, abandonné.”76 Modern scholars have tried to explain Degas’s repeated images. According to Anne Roquebert, the non finito played an important part in Degas’s art, as he accepted it as an end in itself, no longer discriminating between the sketch, the study, and the finished work. The artworks were single fragments of a work in progress and a process that could help one understand the secrets of creation.77 For the aged Degas, who no longer pursued sitters along his urban itineraries in order to study them, nor returned to the studio to execute their portraits, creation had become bound to the studio and to the maison d’artiste. The studio was for Degas, as it was for the artists of the Renaissance, “the site of a foundational experience of the world or self,” and a “romantically open-ended model of creation,” to use Christopher Wood’s words. Besides ballerinas, dancers, horses, and milliners, from 1886 Degas undertook the theme of the bathers (Fig. 10-2). This theme has been widely discussed in Degas’s oeuvre for its presumed load of misogyny,78 but it is linked to the myth of the artist’s creation in the studio, and to Degas’s self-fashioning as a Northern painter. In 1890, in L’Art Dans les Deux Mondes, Geffroy wrote about Degas that it was in the representation of the dancer on stage and in that of the woman naked, “chez elle, dans son cabinet de toilette,” that Degas’s philosophy and drawing found their complete expression. As for the bathers, Degas “a voulu peindre la femme qui ne sait pas regardée,” as if she were not posing:

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Fig. 10-2 Le Tub, 1886, pastel on card, cm 60 x 83, Musée d’Orsay.

In writing a “navrant et lamentable poême de la chair,” Degas pictured the woman at her toilette, surrounded by her grooming utensils: Il l’a vue, à hauteur du sol, près des marbres encombrés de ciseaux, de brosses, de peignes, de faux cheveux,- et il n’a rien dissimulé de ses allures de batracien, du mûrissement de ses seins, de la lourdeur de ses parties basses, des flexions torses de ses jambes, de la longueur de ses bras, des apparitions stupéfiantes des ventres, des genoux et des pieds dans des raccourcis inattendus.79

The bath scene, as Wood writes, was a Northern topos traceable back to Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. Degas’s place is in a sequence that includes Albrecht Dürer, who, in his Women’s Bath-house of 1496 (Bremen, Kunsthalle) represents his own curiosity in the form of an only dimly visible man peeping through a half-open window, spying on the society of bathers and attendants. Dürer figures the bathhouse as a parable of the intrusion of life drawing into the painter’s workshop. This is a shop not open to the street

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but rather tightly sealed from air and eyes. The “work” of the saunasponging, brushing, scrubbing, combing, kneading, birching-is a preparation for the display of the body so it can be admired. And this in a sense is also the work of the painter’s shop. Dürer’s Women’s Bath-House is the first studio scene.80

His seclusion in the atelier, guarded by his maid Zoë Closier, has been read literally, but, in truth, Degas’s retreat into his world, like his attendance of the Opera, or the race course, was not literal, but metaphorical and political. In fact, the bohemian and anarchist Degas was more attached than ever to his petit bourgeois and anarchist Montmartre. In an article of 1918, George Moore recalled a solitary Degas nested in his Pigalle studio: Into this solitude a certain French nobleman, the Playboy of Paris, the inspiration of Huysmans’s des Esseintes, the hero of “A Rebours,” succeeded at last in clambering through an unguarded loophole and reaching Degas. “Why, Monsieur Degas,” he asked, “do you remain always at Montmartre; why not let me take you to the Faubourg SaintGermain?” The answer he got was: “Monsieur le comte de--, leave me upon my dunghill”- (…).81

In the extent to which the retreat into the private is a symbolic retreat into the feminine, the subject of Degas’s aesthetic house raises the issues of Degas’s perspective on marriage, and of his household arrangements. Degas, an urbane Parisian, was not a misogynist: he did not fear the presence of a woman in his artist’s space, an attitude which would be unthinkable for an artist dealing with models. What he did not wish to confront was precisely a wife’s power, her demands and decisions, her judgments on his work, her intrusion into his artist’s space. He could not have put up with the dominant role in the domestic sphere that women were assigned by the social order in nineteenth-century France. In a sense, and despite the accusations of misogyny,82 in his relationship with women Degas was so much more modern than many others: he acknowledged, praised, and dealt with women who worked and therefore stood the ground of female independence, and who also were the subject matter of his art, but would not accept that traditional category, the wife, and the family it entailed, which in his view threatened the artist’s identity and the very space of his obsessions. In Degas’s refusal to conform, in his artist’s life, to a conventional image of woman, and to a conventional lifestyle, a central role had his bonne, the maid Degas shared his life with. After the death of Sabine Neyt, his Dutch maid, Degas employed Zoë, who stayed with him until around 1912. We know what her duties were from the

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Fig. 10-3 Self-Portrait with Zoë Closier, 1900, photograph, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF), Paris.

Fig. 10-4 Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Self-Portrait with Saskia, 1636, etching, plate: cm 10.5 x 9.4, sheet: cm 12.7 x 10.4, Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

accounts of such visitors to Degas’s house as Vollard, Valéry, and Alice Michel. Zoë did the shopping with the little money he gave her, delivered notes to, and went to fetch money from, Durand-Ruel. A former schoolteacher, Zoë read to Degas La Libre Parole while he had lunch, and

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he complained to her that she read without accent. Degas praised the orange marmalade she made.83 They had frequent arguments, where she threatened to leave and he pretended to dismiss her, but everything settled quickly. Most of all, Zoë opened the door, warding off intruders and supervising the visitors, who were not allowed in rooms where paintings and drawings were found.84 Zoë was one of the women workers Degas dealt with every day, but there was for him a mythical side to her, since she also was the guardian of his bachelor’s maison d’artiste, its real feminine soul. When Degas portrayed himself with Zoë in 1895 (Fig 103), using his new photographic camera, he was confessing that two Romantic myths were at stake with his and Zoë’s image: the myth of the studio and the myth of the gatekeeper. As Marc Gotlieb has written, the gatekeeper occupied a crucial role in the Romantic mythology of the studio, that of sentinel and accomplice at once.85 And so, as he traced their double portrait over Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Saskia (Fig. 10-4), he was also acknowledging the importance of her presence in what was his last avant-garde project, that of his maison d’artiste. In my mapping Degas, the artist’s last work, his maison d’artiste, melds Degas’s real, symbolic, and invented spaces in the conquest of the space par excellence, that of interiority.

Notes 1

As Patrice Higonnet points out in Paris: Capital of the World, “Although it is accurate to say that the political content of the myth of old Paris shifted very sharply to the right after 1880,” the nostalgia for old Paris was as much a left-wing as a right-wing argument against “Haussmannian liberalism” and “moneyed Paris.” Drumont ‘admired the immanent morality of the Parisian working class” and Higonnet finds in Léon Daudet’s writings the same reactionary idea, “that Parisian ‘Frenchness’ was essentially working class and would be restored to its Gallic and noble origins if fascism miraculously triumphed,” a conjunction of extremes epitomized by the fact that Daudet’s Paris vécu was one of the books favoured by Walter Benjamin, “a German Jewish refugee and self-professed Marxist.”: Higonnet, 2002, pp. 93-4. 2 In a letter of 6 March 1895 to his son Lucien in London, Pissarro commented about August Strindberg’s dislike of the impressionists which had led him to refuse to write a preface for the catalogue of the auction of works by Gauguin who was hoping to raise money for his trip to Tahiti. Strindberg, wrote Pissarro, “has a poor opinion of the impressionists, he understands no one but Puvis de Chavannes. That’s the thing, it is always the Greek, the Renaissance, against the tradition of the French Gothic! For we are nearer to the French Gothic, especially Degas!”: Pissarro, 1943, pp. 262-3.

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Degas, whom Pissarro had described as “utterly disgusted with youth” as early as 1891, voiced freely his disgust and on one occasion in 1897 he was accused by Fernand Gregh, a young friend of Daniel Halévy, of “abusing the right to be aggressive by a friend”: Pissarro, 1943, pp. 178-9 and Halévy, 1966, pp. 90-1. 4 See Nord, 2000, p. 44. 5 See Hansen, 1987. 6 Valéry, 1965. 7 See Harriss, 1976. 8 See on this topic Hargrove and McWilliam, eds., 2005. 9 See Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, 2003 for Cézanne and Shaw, 1997 for Puvis de Chavannes. 10 Notebook 24, in Reff, 1976 b, I, pp. 119-21. 11 The letter is conserved at the Documentation of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 12 Winock, 1999, p. 85. 13 See Hause, 1989. 14 As he put in a letter of January 1886 to his son Lucien: “On every side I hear the bourgeois, the professors, the artists and the merchants say that France is finished, decadent, that Germany holds the field, that the future belongs to the mechanics and engineers, to the big German and American bankers.- As if we could foresee what is the cause of her sickness?-that’s the question! She is sick from constant change, she may die, that is true, her fate depends on the other countries of Europe. If they are moving, even if ever so little, we shall see something new. Evidently things cannot remain as they are!”: Pissarro, 1943, p. 66. 15 Winock, 1999, pp. 115-7. 16 In Alain, 1958, p. 21. 17 Green, 1986, p. 29. In the Spring of 1882, with the enactment of the May Laws in Russia under Tsar Alexander III, the Jews of Russia, already confined within the Pale of Settlement since Catherine the Great, were further restricted in their mobility: forced to reside in towns or cities within that territory, and further inhibited in their access to property, education and the practice of business. Under the 1882 tsarist anti-Semitic laws, living and working conditions worsened for the Russian Jews to the point that millions of them felt forced to leave Russia in search of a better life in the United States, Canada, and England. Many thousands of them emigrated to France, and particularly to Paris, between 1880 and 1925, and for these Jews France remained the nation that had emancipated the Jews in 1791, “the land of the Revolution, of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity stretching out to the downtrodden.”: Green, 1986, p. 29 and see pp. 9-41 on the appeal of France for the Russian Jews escaping the Pale of Settlement. 18 Green, 1986, p. 49. 19 Green, 1986, p. 50. 20 Green, 1986, p. 49. 21 See on Russian political circles in Paris: Green, 1986, especially pp. 96-100. 22 Venturi, 1970, vol. 1, p. 122. 23 Cullinane, 2001. 24 Ward, 1996, p. 7.

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See Green, 1987. Charle, 1998, pp. 89-90. 27 Charle, 1998, pp. 93-5. 28 Kendall, 1996. 29 Moore, 1890. In his article, Moore leaves non translated Degas’s interjection, “Dites” (“Tell me…”). 30 We can relate to this circumstance a draft of letter to Degas of October 1890 in which Whistler wrote: “Voilà ce que c’est, mon cher Degas, que de laisser pénétrer chez nous ces infâmes coureurs d’atelier journalistes!- et celui-ci- ce Moore- est un des plus [ignobles] misérables specimen de ce type ignorant, et immorale. Vivant de ce qu’il peut ramasser en guise d’ami pour servir plus tard à nourrir sa haine d’envieux et son estomac de [incomplete]. Il disperse ce qu’il a cueilli, salie et difforme de mensonge ou bien dans quelque ridicule [brochure] gazette dite «d’Art» ou dans le pot au feu ignoble de son frère- un vrai vase de chantage, [illegible] et diffamation- ” : quoted in Macdonald and Newton, 1986. 31 As Moore wrote: “Of his family history it is difficult to obtain any information. Degas is the last person of whom inquiry could be made, He would at once smell an article, and he nips such projects as a terrier nips rats. The unfortunate interlocutor would meet with this answer, “I didn’t know you were a reporter in disguise; if I had, I shouldn’t have received you.” It is rumoured, however, that he is a man of some private fortune, and that he sacrificed the greater part of his income to save his brother, who had lost everything by imprudent speculation in American securities. But what concerns us is his artistic, not his family history.”: Moore, 1890. 32 As Moore recalled years later in his “Memories of Degas,” published in The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs of January1918, after Degas’s death in September 1917. This article begins by evoking the legendary Degas: “In his lifetime legends began to gather about him, and the legend that has attained the greatest currency is that Degas was an old curmudgeon who hated his kind and kept his studio door locked.” At the time of their friendship, before their quarrel, and despite Degas’s reputation of being “harsh and intractable,” Moore had found that “He was courteous to all who knew him, entered into conversation with all who asked to be introduced to him, and invited those who seemed interested in his painting to his studio. Why then the legend? Degas put himself forward as an old curmudgeon, and as it is always easier to believe than to observe he became one in popular imagination; and by degrees this very courteous and kind gentleman, loving his kindred and finding happiness in society, became moulded and fashioned by the words he had uttered casually, without foreseeing that sooner or later he would have to live up to them.”: Moore, 1918. 33 As Richard Shiff has written, in the 1890s, “symbolism and impressionism cannot be set in opposition with respect to many of the central critical issues”: the relationship between the two consisting in a common ground of the centrality to both movements of the artist’s intention to express a subjective experience, or ‘impression”, and of the search for “the elusive and chimerical immediate,” rather than a concern for objective truth: Shiff, 1984, pp. 3-13 (quotes respectively at p. 7 26

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and p. 13), in the context of his discussion of impressionism/modernism as a culture that defined artistic production in terms of originality. 34 Geffroy, 1890. 35 See Loyrette, 1991, pp. 589-90. 36 Degas, 1947, pp. 176-7. 37 Degas, 1947, p. 129. 38 Degas, 1947, p. 212 and Halévy, 1966, p. 34 and pp. 62-3. 39 Gourmont, 1892. 40 See Lay, 1978. 41 Miles, 2001, p. 8 and p. 14. 42 “Because neo-impressionism claimed as its artistic lineage a tradition that now seemed to be controlled by dealers, in private spaces to which it had no access, the group and its critics assumed a distinctively public and historic profile. The vanguardism of neo-impressionism required a public space, even though favorable critics might dismiss the tastes of the independents’ audiences and the painters themselves might desire more dignified venues.”: Ward, 1996, p. 56. 43 John Hutchinson, “Cultural Nationalism,” in Breuilly, ed., 2013, pp. 75-94. 44 See Halévy, 1966, pp. 97-102 45 See Halévy, 1960; Hansen, 1987, and Balard, 2002, p. 16. 46 See Daniel Halévy, Notes sur les salons de ma tante Geneviève, in Balard, 2002, p. 398-401. 47 Degas, 1947, p. 142. 48 In the portrait appear Ludovic and Daniel Halévy, Boulanger-Cavé, JacquesEmile Blanche, Henri Gervex, and Sickert. 49 See Martin-Fugier, 2003, p. 304-11 and 314-7; Degas, 1947; Jullian, 1971; Wright, 1973; Kolb and Adhémar, 1984. 50 The Dreyfus affair lasted from late 1894 until July 1906, when Alfred Dreyfus was rehabilitated and reinstated in the army. 51 As Bénédite wrote in 1899, Bartholomé’s art stood against the “éternel dilettantisme mythologique,” the narrowness of the “inspiration anthromorphique et païenne” and the “obsession des conventions pédagogiques, des traditions latines implantées par les grands décorateurs italiens du XVIe siècle.” According to Bénédite, such renewal of French sculpture in the name of a nationalism and a spiritualism of Northern and Christian essence was also pursued by other sculptors: Dalou and Meunier, expressing their “idéal démocratique et social,” Auguste Rodin expressed “un verbe plus humain, plus passionné, plus expressif.”: Bénédite, 1899. 52 Pissarro, 1943, p. 142. 53 See Blanche, 1930; Jeanniot, 1933 and Burollet, 1967. Also see Loyrette, 1991, pp. 555-62. 54 See Alazard, 1936. 55 Lapauze, 1918. 56 Antliff, 1997. 57 Valéry, 1965, pp. 221-2.

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58 The latter had been radical and groundbreaking in at least one other respect: unlike neo-impressionism and twentieth-century avant-gardes, Impressionism included women artists such as Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, whom Degas admired just as he admired the artists Victoria Dubourg, Marie Bracquemond, Suzanne Valadon, the musicians Suzanne Manet, Marie Dihau, Blanche Camus, or the talents of café-concert singers or circus acrobats such as Miss La-la. As Martha Ward points out, the technological abstractions of the neo-impressionist avantgarde have been read as male responses “to the threats posed by a feminization of art” evidence of which were not just the prominence of women in the art world but the very essence of Impressionist art, read as an art of elite and private spaces and of “whatever feminization that retreat into the private implied with its embrace of aestheticization and non discursive sensuality.”: Ward, 1996 p. 10-1. 59 Gary Tinterow, “Degas’s Degases” in Degas, 1997, p. 76. 60 Lafond, 1918, pp. 114-21. See also Lemoisne, 1954. 61 Fry, 1918. 62 Loyrette, 1998. 63 Morisot, 1950, p. 185 and Halévy, 1966, pp. 85-6. For Degas’s intention to found a museum also see Lafond, 1918, pp. 118-22; Lemoisne, 1946, I, pp. 173-82 and Moreau-Nélaton, 1931. 64 This has been the subject of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1997-98: see in particular the contributions of Ann Dumas and Theodore Reff in Degas, 1997. 65 See Loyrette, 1998. 66 Loyrette, 1991, p. 622. 67 Degas’s collecting in the mid 1890s was “a result of concern for his own oeuvre and where it was to end up. There were many different underlying factors that went together to make the idea of a museum attractive: the bitter reflections that came over him when he reached sixty; the absence of financial worries which allowed him to keep the essential part of his own production and to sell only certain ‘articles’; his artistic isolation at a time when, in Pissarro’s words, ‘l’impressionnisme paraît perdre du terrain’ (Degas alone, apart from Monet, seemed able to extract himself); the poor relations he had with the French museums and his campaign in 1896 against the Louvre’s ‘scouring’ (lessivages) of Carpaccio, Poussin and Rubens; his fury when in 1897 he saw his work hung in the despised Luxembourg as part of the Caillebotte bequest; the similar projects being entertained by his collector friends Henri Rouart and Etienne Moreau-Nélaton.”: Loyrette, 1998. 68 Loyrette, 1998. 69 In March 1918, a few weeks before the Degas sale which would disperse his property, Armand Dayot described for L’Illustration Degas’s apartment on the boulevard de Clichy: “Après son départ de la rue Victor- Massé, départ nécessité par la démolition de l’immeuble qui l’avait hospitalisé pendant plus de vingt ans, Degas vieux, presque aveugle, envahi de plus en plus de par son incurable et hargneuse misanthropie, séparé par la mort et par l’abandon de la plupart de ses rares amis, vint échouer dans le plus banal des appartements du boulevard de

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Clichy, avec les innombrables trésors d’art découverts par sa curiosité si renseignée et qui, dans quelques jours, seront dispersés au bruit sec du marteau du commissaire priseur. Cet appartement, ou plutôt cette suite d’appartements, se composait de nombreuses petites pièces où sommeillaient toutes ces œuvres empilées sur les planches, le long des cloisons, enfouies dans de vieilles mailles ou dans des meubles de cuisine…Œuvres entassées, pêle-mêle, dans un désastreux pour un bon nombre d’entre elles, les pastels surtout, et signées du nom du Greco, d’Albert Cuyp, de Peyronneau, de J.-B. Tiepolo, de David, d’Ingres, de Delacroix, de Daumier, de Rousseau, de Corot, de Raffet e Millet, de Heim, de Manet, de Puvis de Chavannes, de Sisley, de Menzel, de Pissaro, de Berthe Morisot, de Van Gogh, de Cézanne- je ne mentionne que les morts. L’interdiction farouche de ne jamais frôler, même du bout du plumeau, ces entassements de chefs-d’œuvre, permettait aux araignées d’y tisser librement leurs toiles, et à la subtile poussière parisienne de les envelopper chaque jour davantage, pendant que le vieil artiste, dans son mélancolique isolement, au milieu de ces merveilles qu’il ne pouvait plus admirer, s’efforçait de mettre un peu de lumière dans l’ombre épaisse de ses dernières heures, en cherchant à faire naître d’un bloc de cire de gracieuses formes féminines sous la caresse tâtonnante de ses doigts fiévreux et tremblants.”: Dayot, 1918. 70 Fevre, 1949. 71 Tinterow in Degas, 1988, p. 363 72 See Degas, 1947, p. 94-5, pp. 123-4, p. 207, p. 212, pp. 227-28. 73 Gimpel, 1986, pp. 213-14. 74 Gimpel, 1986, p. 78. Vollard did not specify if this happened on the occasion of Degas’s move from the studio at 21 rue Pigalle to the rue Victor-Massé in 1882 or on the occasion of the move from the rue Victor-Massé to the boulevard de Clichy in 1912. 75 Degas, 1947, p. 229. 76 Vollard, 1938, p. 117. 77 Roquebert, 1988. 78 See for instance Callen, 1995. 79 For Geffroy, the woman that Degas painted was “une certaine femme, sans l’expression du visage, sans le jeu de l’oeil, sans le décor de la toilette, la femme réduite à la gesticulation de ses membres, à l’aspect de son corps, la femme considérée en femelle, exprimée dans sa seule animalité, comme s’il était agi d’un traité d’histoire naturelle réclamant une illustration supérieure.” : Geffroy, 1890. 80 See Christopher S. Wood, “Indoor-Outdoor: the Studio around 1500,” in Coles and Pardo, pp. 36-72. 81 Moore, 1918. 82 See Callen, 1995. 83 Vollard, 1938, pp. 101-2. 84 Vollard, 1938, p. 108. 85 In the second half the nineteenth century, critics, friends and collectors spoke of the difficulties they encountered in gaining access to artists’ studios, their privacy secured by the obscurity of their surroundings and by the complicity of the artists’

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porters or housekeepers. As Delacroix grew older, for example, he was increasingly reluctant to admit visitors, particularly in his new quarters on rue Furstenberg. He was assisted in this respect by a new accomplice. In the Romantic mythology of the studio, the figure of the gatekeeper occupies a crucial role. For Delacroix it was Jenny Le Guillou, his long-time housekeeper, companion and, it seemed to Silvestre, effectively his “bodyguard.” Only those well-known to the artist, Silvestre complained, were able to get past “this terrible sentinel” whom Delacroix had charged-and who had charged herself-with barring entry to those felt to talk too much or stay too long.”: Marc Gotlieb, “Creation & Death in the Romantic Studio,” in Coles and Pardo, pp. 147-183. Armand Silvestre was the author of the volumes of Les Artistes Français, published by Crès in 1926, from which Gotlieb cites in the passage above.

CONCLUSION

Edgar Degas was a bohemian and an anti-classicist committed to the conquest of an artistic self and to the conquest of a space that was physical as well as metaphorical. The space that Degas had to conquer was physical, or real, in the sense that spatial strategies had to be devised in order to achieve visibility and in the sense that a space of exhibition had to be appropriated and recreated, invented, that is. Degas also had to conquer a metaphorical or symbolic space, a space of one’s own, that is: an artistic identity comprising of a reputation, an audience, themes, and style recognisable as an artist’s own. Real spaces, invented spaces, and symbolic spaces are interwoven in Degas’s art, in the distinct periods of his life. In his response and resistance to the pressures of the art system in the second half of the nineteenth century in France, Degas understood artistic agency in terms of self-fashioning and conquest of urban space. In fact, self-fashioning and urban spaces accompanied and even meant each other: the artist’s professional survival not simply demanded an occupation of terrain, but identification with it, as the artist’s identity became invested with urban space in his progression, appropriation and recreation of space in his art. One side of Degas’s spatial identity is that in his re-arrangement of space in his oeuvre Degas made use of his memory, both of art and of life. In this sense, his art is commemorative and celebrative. The other side of Degas’s spatial identity is his interest in the Parisian artist as embodiment of a working class and almost mythical ninth arrondissement, an interest in which self-fashioning and autobiography are evident. Degas’s avant-garde project delineates itself as one in which the commemorative and celebrative nature of his art make one story with his self-fashioning and autobiography as the painter of painters, the painter tout court. Despite the claim made by deconstructionist theorists that “an unbridgeable gulf exists between artist and artwork,” the anecdotic nature of recurring accounts of Degas’s life confirm that the life and work model is “part and parcel” of art history, to use Charles Salas’s words.1 By revealing the anecdotic nature of Degas’s conventional biography and by following the progression of his avant-garde engagement and the motivations behind it, one understands how, in the spaces of Parisian modernity, such transformations were brought about as the birth of the

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critic-dealer system and the modernist biographical model, as well as the formation of the intellectual class. As Debora Silverman has written, Biography is both an exasperating vehicle perpetuating the myth of romantic exceptionalism and a promising terrain of cultural history, where the lives of artists may serve to illuminate broader problems and expose the pressure points of social transformation (…).2

Degas’s conventional biography conforms to the “exceptionalism” of the modernist biographical model, which puts the artist as genius at the centre of the narrative. As Greg Thomas has explained, the modernist biographical model originated as “the primary art historical methodology” in nineteenth-century France, in parallel with the institutional birth of art history: “the forging of national character and a national school tended in France to be based on establishing a pantheon of individual geniuses rather than delineating national styles or iconographies.” Because the two discourses of art history and biography are folded into each other, “for virtually every avant-garde French artist of the nineteenth century, the basic historical record upon which historians today must still rely is already deeply skewed by the biographical form through which historical reality has been filtered. Even more insidious, artists themselves adopted many of the tenets of biographical discourse,” by acting out in various ways, “the lives that biography expected of them.” As Thomas points out, the biographical model is “so ingrained in the process of relating art objects to history that it hardly seems like a methodology at all.” Despite its status as “one of the most fundamental methodologies of the art historical system,” the biographical methodology still lacks a theorist.3 Leaving aside the problem of the concomitance of art history and modernism, and to return to Degas, biography, as Silverman suggests, can also be the terrain for cultural history, when it historicises the subject by balancing the individual and the social aspects of the discourse. The place of biography in the history of art was the 2002-3 research theme at the Getty Research Institute. The symposia held there were followed by the publication of The Life and the Work. Art and Biography, a collection of essays variously contributing to the “possibility that the complexities of the life may resonate with the complexities of the work.”4 Within this debate, my study affirms the importance of historicising the subject, in other words, it affirms the relevance of an artist’s biography in the practice of art history. More specifically, in my contribution, artist’s biography, space and social interaction are interwoven and cannot be separated in a valid history of art, emancipated from the anecdotal model of artist’s biography that informs the discipline since Giorgio Vasari.5 As Degas

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knew, only the repudiation of the life from any consideration of the work would leave enough room for the writing of another life, the anecdotic life of the Artist. This explains why, not unlike the theorists of poststructuralism who proclaimed, with the death of the author,6 the irrelevance of the life to the work, Degas, the famously enigmatic artist, wanted to be illustrious and unknown.

Notes 1

Salas, ed., 2007, p. 2. Debora L. Silverman, “Biography, Brush and Tools: Historicizing Subjectivity; The Case of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin,” in Salas, ed., 2007, pp. 74-96. 3 Greg M. Thomas, “Instituting Genius. The Formation of Biographical Art History in France” in Mansfield, ed., 2002, pp. 260-70. 4 See Salas, ed., 2007, p. 17. 5 See Soussloff, 2005 and Greg M. Thomas, “Instituting Genius: The Formation of Biographical Art History in France,” in Mansfield, ed., 2002, pp. 260-70. 6 Namely, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida: see Rosalind Krauss, “Who Comes after the Subject?,” in Salas, ed., 2007, pp. 28-33. 2

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INDEX

Abelard, 246 About, Edmond, 122, 203 Aertsen, Pieter, 147 Agnew, 126, 192 Agoult, Marie d’, 42 Albert of Arenberg, 143 Albrecht, 172 Alexander, 91 Alighieri, Dante, 72 Alken, Henry, 118 Altès, Joseph-Henri, 226 Anacharsis, 95 Andrée, Ellen, 8 Apollo, 95 Armstrong, Thomas, 164 Arnoux, Mme, 97 Artemis, 104 Astaire, Fred, 199 Astruc, Rabbi, 144, 261-64, 266 Astruc, Zacharie, 149, 194, 203 Auber, 167 Bachoux, Berthe-Marie, see Jeantaud, Mme, 272 Balen, Martin van der, 153 Balzac, Honoré de, 13, 27, 184, 189, 229, 240 Banville, Théodore de, 149 Barat, Madeleine-Sophie, 52 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules, 104, 119 Barucci, Giulia, 167 Barrias, Félix-Joseph, 55, 59 Barthélémy, Abbé, 95 Bartholomé, Albert, 292, 303-306 Baty, Gaston, 200 Baudelaire, Charles, 149, 161-62, 189, 226, 229, 240 Bazille, Frédéric, 149, 193, 203, 226, 259, 262 Bazin, Armand, 49, 55

Beardsley, Aubrey, 133 Beato Angelico, 76, 77 Beaucousin, Mr, 80 Beaufort, 102 Beauregard, Angèle, 153 Beauregard, Gabrielle, 153 Beazzano, Agostino, 72, 169 Bécat, Emilie, 280 Bédel, Louis Auguste, 85 Bell, William, 191 Bellelli, Gennaro, 74, 86-87 Bellelli, Giovanna, 74, 80, 86-87, 153 Bellelli, Giulia, 74, 80, 86-87, 153 Bellelli, Laure (also see Degas, Laure), 8, 44, 74, 78, 86-87, 89, 141 Bellet du Poisat, Alfred-Pierre, 148 Bellini, Giovanni, 78 Belloir et Godillot, 204 Bénédite, Léonce, 303 Benjamin, Walter, 200 Béraldi, Henri, 280 Bergson, Henri, 255 Bernheim-Jeune, 199, 200 Bernheim, Georges, 199 Berthon, 100 Beuckelaer, Joachim, 147 Beugniet, 199 Beuret, Rose, 248 Bismarck, Otto von, 295 Bizet, Georges, 73, 303 Blanc, Charles, 187 Blanche, Jacques-Emile, 9, 133, 303 Boldini, Giovanni, 305 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon (Napoleon III), 37, 54, 56, 115, 120-21, 132, 161, 174, 194, 226, 259, 263-64

Mapping Degas Bonaparte, Mathilde, 146 Bonaparte, Napoléon, 38, 42, 45, 54, 120 Bonnat, Léon, 10, 11, 73, 84, 148, 163-64 Bonnat, Marie, 164 Bosch, Jaime, 149 Botticelli, Sandro, 73, 78, 82, 87 Boucher, François, 56, 156, 186 Boudin, Eugène, 131, 132 Bouguereau, Willliam, 259 Boulanger-Cavé, Albert, 133, 303 Bourbon, Marie de, 105 Bourdon, 56 Bourguignon, Jean-Baptiste, 37 Bourguignon, Pierre, 105 Bouvenne, Aglaüs, 301 Bouvet, Alfred, 138 Bouvier, 194 Bracquemond, Félix, 149, 164, 206, 276-79, 283 Bracquemond, Marie, 172, 276 Brantôme, Abbé de, 93 Breguet, Louise, 117-18, 303 Brignole-Sale, Anton Giulio, 87 Brignole-Sale, Aurelia, 87 Brignole-Sale, Geronima, 87 Brignole-Sale, Paolina, 80-82, 87 Brittan Willis H., 126 Bronzino, Agnolo, 78 Bruegel, Jan, the Elder, 59, 276 Brummell, George, 104 Bruyas, Alfred, 131 Bucephalas, 91 Buñuel, Luis, 199 Burke, Edmund, 117 Burty, Philippe, 203, 209, 266 Butler, General, 101 Cabanel, Alexandre, 205, 284 Cachardy, 199 Cadart, 273 Caillebotte, Gustave, 140, 164, 204, 210, 278-79 Camondo, Isaac de, 296 Camus, Dr Emile, 155-56 Mme Camus, 155-7, 158, 223, 227

373

Candaules, 93 Candaules’s wife, 93 Carné, Marcel, 200 Carolus-Duran, 152, 203 Carpaccio, Vittore, 73, 78, 79, 82, 87 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste, 167, 231 Caruel, Alexandrine, 98 Cassatt, Mary, 9, 172, 212, 269, 273, 277-78, 293 Castagnary, Jules-Antoine, 203 Cézanne, Paul, 4, 203, 210, 248, 259, 269, 294, 307 Chabert, Edmé, 283-84 Chabrier, Emmanuel, 149, 223, 22728 Cham, 167 Champaigne, Philippe de, 56, 186 Champfleury, 149, 186, 201, 203 Chapu, Henri, 73 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 56, 186, 226 Charles I, King, 143 Charles X, King, 41 Charpentier, Auguste, 104, 152 Chatté, Mr, 85 Chenavard, Paul, 60 Chéruel, Pierre-Adolphe, 104 Chesneau, Ernest, 232 Chevreuse, 102 Chevreuse, Duchesse de, 102 Chialiva, Jules, 213 Chialiva, Luigi, 213 Christine de France, Madame Royale, 103 Cimabue, 76 Clarétie, Jules, 211-12 Clemenceau, Georges, 149, 260, 269 Clère, Camille, 73 Closier, Zoë, 90, 96, 313-15 Clouet, Jean, 186 Cluseret, Gustave-Paul, 260 Cluzel, 224 Collin, Gustave, 270 Comte, Auguste, 96

374 Condé, 102 Condé, Princesse de, 102 Conder, Charles, 133 Constant, Benjamin, 151 Coquerel, Athanase, 76 Cordey, Frédéric, 210 Coriolis, Naz de, 97 Cormon, Fernand, 270, 250 Corneille, Pierre, 112 Corot, Camille, 102, 119, 126, 151, 186, 241, 302, 307 Correggio, Antonio, 186 Cotterel, 126 Courbet, Gustave, 18, 26, 29, 39, 55, 59, 62, 64, 102, 115, 121-22, 127-32, 141-42, 151, 164, 167, 185, 186, 188, 198, 201, 264-65, 266, 267, 283, 307, 308 Courcy, Frédéric de, 73, 84, 85 Cousin, Victor, 76 Couture, Thomas, 55, 148, 151 Cuvelier, Joseph, 262, 295 Danton, Georges, 52 Daubigny, Charles-François, 259 Daudet, Alphonse, 248 Dauphin, Charles, 104-105 Daumier, Honoré, 13, 266 David, Jacques-Louis, 55, 72-73, 186 Dearmer, Percy, 114, 127, 130 Debord, Guy, 5 Decamps, 64 Degas, Achille (1812-1875), 37, 40, 44, 151, 174, 191, 295, 303 Degas, Achille (1838-1893), 44, 47, 52, 56, 88 Degas, Auguste, 8, 26, 35, 37, 4044, 45-46, 47-49, 52, 55, 58, 62, 74-80, 85, 88, 140-41, 150, 155, 158, 159, 160, 206, 223, 228, 270, 307 Degas, Augustin, 37, 38, 40 Degas, Aurora, see Freppa, Aurora Degas, Célestine, see Musson, Célestine

Index Degas, Edgar, anarchism: 11, 25, 41-42, 278-79, 282-83, 292-306, 309-10; Anglophilia: 6, 29, 11432; anti-Dreyfusardism: 10, 30, 296-298, 302-3; anti-Semitism and anti-Protestantism: 11-12, 23, 41, 296-98, 302-; art collector: 13; and Berthe Morisot, 165-52; bohemianism: 4-5, 7, 14, 22, 25, 140-41, 18284, 188-89; copyist, 60-63, 7183, 185-87; classicist: 63-65, 92; during the Commune: 30, 262-69; ethno-geography of: 5354, 280-81; family: 35-59; feminist interpretations of: 1517, 24; and Gauguin: 10-11; history paintings by, 90-107; hygiène de l’artiste: 246-55; Impressionist exhibitions, 28385; ingriste: 62-65, 305; and Italian art: 6, 9, 28, 64-65, 7183; and Left Bank: 26, 52-59; and Lepic: 169-75, 270-83; at Louis-le-Grand, 53-55, 58, 62; mad: 19-24; maison d’artiste: 30, 306-15; and Manet: 3-4, 22-23, 27, 123-24, 167-68, 182-86, 221, 258-62, 268-69, 279; misanthrope: 1415, 17-8, 299-301; modern interpretations of: 13-18; and Moreau: 71-82; myth of :1-2; self-fashioning: 2-3, 6-7, 11, 14, 18, 68-69, 196; in Normandy: 6, 29, 114-32; Northern-ness: 67, 16-17, 21-23, 25, 27, 29, 5859, 64, 80-82, 87-88, 142-45, 158, 164-65, 184-85,189-97, 231-38, 271-83, 304-5, 311-12; Parisian-ness: 52-54, 200-201, 279-83, 313; personal museum: 11-12, 306-15; and Pissarro: 273-283; primary sources: 7-12; and Right Bank: 44-52, 85; (self-)portraiture: 6, 14, 59-65,

Mapping Degas 140-75, 190-96, 223-28, 270-71, 314-15; technique: 12, 13, 21213, 238-39 Degas, Edouard, 37, 40 Degas, Henri, 37, 40, 49 Degas, Laure (also see Bellelli, Laure), 37, 49 Degas, Marguerite, 52, 56, 90, 303 Degas, René, 7, 44, 47, 55, 191, 280 Degas, René-Hilaire, 8, 35-44, 46, 47, 52, 72, 87, 100 Degas, Rose, 37 Degas, Stephanie (Fanny), 37, 49 Degas, Thérèse, 52, 56, 88, 89-90, 160, 161 Delacroix, Eugène 13, 45, 54, 55, 59, 64, 75, 76, 80, 82, 84-85, 92, 98, 122, 124, 148, 151, 162, 166, 184, 185, 296, 307-8 Delaroche, Paul, 45 Delaunay, Elie, 78, 84 Delécluze, Jean-Etienne, 42, 73, 76 Délibes, Léo, 204 Delvau, Alfred, 201-202 Delzant, Alidor, 100 Demailly, Charles, 96-97, 107 Demailly, Marthe, 96 Denfert-Rochereau, Colonel, 294 Denis, Maurice, 39, 302 Déon, Horsin, 56 Desboutin, Marcellin, 169, 175, 203, 272-76 Deslions, Anna, 167 Desmoulins, Camille, 54 Destouches, Paul-Emile, 52 Détrimont, 199 Devéria, Achille, 59 Diderot, Denis, 204 Digby, Kenelm, 144 Dihau, Désiré, 125, 158-59, 223-26, 230 Dihau, Henri, 158, 223-26 Dihau, Marie, 157, 158-59, 223-26 Diodorus Siculus, 98 Disdéri, André-Adolphe-Eugène, 144

375

Doncieux, Camille, 248 Dreux, Alfred de, 82, 118, 121, Dreyfus Affair, 17, 170, 269, 277, 279, 292, 296-298, 299, 303-4 Drouais, François-Hubert, 158 Drumont, Edouard, 39, 297, 298, 304 Dubourg, Victoria, 149, 155, 186, 226, 276 Duchesnois, Mademoiselle, 45 Dumas, Alexandre, 203 Dumoustier de Frédilly, Blanche, see Camus, Mme Durand-Gréville, Emile, 100 Durand-Ruel, Paul, 8, 10, 12, 57, 159, 197, 199, 200, 210, 223, 228, 233, 254, 259, 261, 277, 301-2, 304, 310-11, 314 Duranty, Edmond, 149, 204, 211 Dürer, Albrecht, 59, 62, 144, 275, 280, 313 Duret, Théodore, 60, 125, 149, 19596, 203 Dyck, Anthony van, 6, 8, 18, 26, 27, 56, 61, 71-76, 80-82, 87, 102103, 142-44, 147, 152, 160, 165, 169, 172, 175, 184, 195, 225, 262, 271 Edwards, Charles, 199 El Greco, 306, 307 Enault, Louis, 192 Engels, Friedrich, 42 Ephrussi, Charles, 303 Espagnac, Count d’ , 187 Eugénie, Empress, 56, 120, 146, 226 Eyck, Jan van, 312 Fabritius, Carel, 233 Fantin-Latour, Henri 26, 57, 58,124, 149, 152, 154, 155, 164, 186, 189, 190, 192-95, 203, 204, 206, 226, 228, 260, 276 Faure, Jean-Baptiste, 197, 228 Favart, Mme, 158 Favre, Jules, 259 Fevre, Henri, 90, 270 Fevre, Jeanne, 333

376 Fiocre, Eugénie, 228, 230-31 Fiquet, Hortense, 248 Flandrin, Hyppolite, 60, 76, 148 Flaubert, Gustave, 96-97, 107, 247 Fontainas, André, 10 Forain, Jean-Louis, 303, 305, 306 Fortoul, Hyppolite, 76 Fouquier, Achille, 163-64 Fragonard, 56, 186, 226 Francesca, 98 Franchoys, Pieter, 56 Franciabigio, 60 Franc-Lamy, 210 Freppa, Aurora, 37, 40, 46, 47 Freppa, Lorenzo, 37 Fromentin, Eugène, 84 Fortoul, Hyppolite, 81 Fry, Roger, 330-31 Fumo, Michele, 37 Gabriel, Jacques-Ange, 172 Galignani, 187 Gambetta, Léon, 149, 167, 259, 260, 295 Garnier, Charles, 211 Gaugelin, Joséphine, 153 Gauguin, Paul, 9, 10, 11, 13, 211, 278, 302, 307 Gauthier, Armand, 270 Gautier, Théophile, 76, 189, 200, 229, 240 Gavarni, Paul, 45, 196, 203 Geffroy, Gustave 2, 202, 280, 298, 300-1, 311 Gentileschi, Orazio, 143 Géricault, Théodore, 45, 82, 98, 117, 118, 124, 166 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 163, 284 Gervex, Henri, 133 Gilles, Mr, 85 Gileu, Mme, 85 Gimpel, René, 9, 310 Giorgione, 73, 78, 79, 82, 87 Giotto, 62, 76 Giraudoux, Jean, 199 Gleyre, 186 Gluck, 280

Index Gobillard, Théodore, 154 Gobillard, Yves, see Morisot, Yves Gogh, Theo van, 9, 10, 270, 300, 250, 277 Gogh, Vincent van, 9, 10, 13, 229, 249-55, 307 Goltzius, Hendrik, 61 Goncourt, Edmond de, 7, 9, 10, 16, 19, 20-21, 22, 39, 96-97, 107, 160, 166, 203, 213, 232, 247, 251 Goncourt, Jules de, 96-97, 107, 160, 203, 247, 251 Gonzalès, Eva, 149 Goupil, 164 Gourmont, Rémy de, 302 Goya, Francisco, 59 Graham, Robert, 147-48 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 56 Guérin, Marcel, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 61, 62 Guillaumin, Armand, 210 Guillemet, Antoine, 203 Guimond, Esther, 167 Guitry, Sacha, 183, 199 Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, 144 Guys, Constantin, 161, 203 Guzman, 143 Haas, Charles, 303 Halévy, Daniel, 7, 9, 10, 11, 39, 117, 133, 303-4, 308 Halévy, Elie, 117, 296, 303 Halévy, Fromental, 54 Halévy, Geneviève, see Straus, Geneviève Halévy, Léon, 54 Halévy Louise, see Breguet, Louise Halévy, Ludovic 16, 50-51, 54, 117, 133, 146, 169, 171, 172, 228, 233, 293, 303 Hals, Frans, 56, 143 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, Baron, 13, 42, 200 Havemeyer, Louisine, 211 Hecht, Albert, 232, 233, 272 Heffernan, Jo, 130

Mapping Degas Heidegger, Martin, 255 Henner, Jean-Jacques, 100, 207, 272 Henri IV, King, 103 Henry of Huntingdon, 114 Herodotus, 93 Herring, J. F., 118 Hertford, Lord, 167, 187 Hertz, Henri, 261 Hondekoeter, 56 Hook, James C., 126 Horace, 101 Howland, Mme, 303 Hufeland, C. F., 252 Hugo, Victor, 96, 184 Hunt, William Holman, 126 Hurel, Abbé, 76 Hutin, Mme, 85 Huygens, Constantijn, 144 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 2, 213, 298, 303, 313 Hygieia, 246 Hyppolitus, 98 Inchbold, William, 126 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 1, 13, 20, 26, 55, 59, 60, 62-63, 64, 65, 75, 76, 80, 98, 127, 164, 307-8 Ingres, Mme, 62 Isabey, Jean-Baptiste, 45 Jacob-Desmalter, Hélène, 270 Janmot, Louis, 60 Jeantaud, Charles, 171, 265-66 Jeantaud, Mme, 294 Jeanniot, Georges, 9, 305 Jephthah, 92-107 Jephthah’s daughter, 92-107 Jollivet, 76 Jongkind, Johan, 132 Joséphine, Empress, 147 Jouve, Abbé, 76 Julius Caesar, 174 Kant, Immanuel, 27 Khalil Bey, 167, 199 Koëlla, Léon see Leenhoff, Léon Koenigswarter, Antoine, 78, Kossuth, Lajos, 42

377

La Caze, Dr Louis, 26, 55, 56, 160, 186, 187, 226-27 Lacheurié, Eugène, 84 Lafond, 40 Lafond, Paul, 7, 306-7 La Fontaine, 10 La Font de Saint-Yenne, 48 Lainé, Edouard, 171, 265-66 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 184 Lambert, Alexandre, 294 Lamothe, Louis, 55, 60, 61, 64, 164 Lamothe, Mme, 85 Lancret, Nicolas, 56 Landseer, Edwin, 121 Lantier, Claude, 248 La Païva, 47, 167 Largillière, Nicolas, 56, 226 Larguier, Léo, 200 l La Rochefoucauld, 102 La Tour, Georges de, 56 Lauzun, Antoine de, 104 Lavrov, Peter, 298 Lay, Howard, 302 Le Bas, Mme, 52 Leblanc, Mr and Mme, 307, 308 Lecoq de Boisbaudran, Horace, 118 Leenhoff, Léon, 149, 150 Leenhoff, Suzanne, see Manet, Suzanne Legouvé, Ernest, 93 Legros, Alphonse, 57, 124, 164, 189, 203, 207 Leighton, Frederic, 205 Lejosne, Commandant Hyppolite, 149 Lejosne, Thérèse, 149 Lemoisne, Paul-André, 2, 7, 8, 9, 19, 21-22, 39, 42, 58, 59, 60-62, 100, 271 Le Nain, brothers, 56, 126, 186 Leonardo, 78 Léonce, 167 Leopold of Belgium, King, 150 Lepic, Eylau, 172, 174 Lepic, Janine, 172 Lepic, Joseph-Louis, 174

378 Lepic, Ludovic, 50-51, 146, 148, 169,180-86, 228, 259, 269-78, 283, 306 Lerolle, Henri, 280 Levert, Léopold, 148, 270, 277 Lévy, Emile, 73, 84, 148 Lewis, Charles, 126 Leys, Henri, 164 Lille, Mademoiselle, 152-53 Linet, Pierre, 171, 265-66 Lipmann, 270 Lipsius, Justus, 154 Liszt, Franz, 146 Livaudais, John, 193 Lorrain, Claude, 59, 72 Lorraine, Marguerite de, 147 Loubens, Mme, 152-53 Louis-Philippe, see Orléans, LouisPhilippe d’, bourgeois King Louis XIII, King, 47, 105 Louis XIV, King, 47, 48, 52, 93, 102, 287 Louis XVIII, King, 41 Loy, Myrna, 200 Lucas, George, 164 Luquet, 140 Lycurgus, 93, 95 Macaulay, Lord, 125 Mac-Mahon, Marshal, Patrice de, 259, 295 Mademoiselle de Montpensier, see Orléans, Mademoiselle d’ Maître, Edmond, 193 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 11, 117, 149, 216, 256, 302, 303 Manet, Edouard, 3, 7, 9, 13, 14, 16, 17, 22, 29, 55, 61, 64, 123-24, 127, 132, 133, 140, 147, 149-50, 151, 152, 155, 159, 164, 166-67, 168, 182-86, 187, 188, 189, 192-94, 195-96, 198, 203, 204, 206-208, 213, 227, 228, 258-62, 267-69, 270, 284, 307, 308 Manet, Eugène, 149, 260 Manet, Eugénie, Mme Edouard, 149, 270

Index Manet, Gustave, 149 Manet, Julie, 308 Manet, Suzanne, 149-50, 157, 223, 227, 260 Manette, 103 Manin, Daniele, 42 Mantegna, Andrea, 20, 59, 73, 82, 87 Manzi, Michel, 305 Marat, Jean-Paul, 52 Marcille, Eudoxe, 26, 55, 56 Marcou, Jules, 128 Marie-Amélie, Queen of France, 147 Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, 115, 147 Mars, Mademoiselle, 40, 45 Martinet, Louis, 84, 185, 203 Marx, Karl, 42, 279, 296 Mathilda, Queen, 119 Matsys, Quentin, 147 Mauclair, Camille, 2, 302 Maupassant, Guy de, 281 Maurier, George du, 164 Maurois, André, 199 Maus, Octave, 301 May, Ernest, 279, 296 Mazarin, Jules, 112 Mazeppa, 98 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 42 Medea, 93 Medici, Queen Marie de’, 103, 143, 147 Meilhac, Henri, 18, 50, 53, 296 Meissonier, Ernest, 55, 261 Meliaudon, 270 Melida, Enrique, 164 Mellinet, General, 144, 261-64, 266 Mérante, Louis, 235 Mercier, 270 Metternich, Pauline Princesse de, 144, 145-47, 167, 231 Metternich, Prince Richard de, 146, 167 Meurice, Paul, 149 Meurice, Mme Paul, 150

Mapping Degas Meyer, Alfred, 283-84 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 114, 231 Michel, Alice, 7, 8, 238, 254, 314 Michelangelo, 72, 166 Michelet, Jules, 96, 260 Millet, Jean-François, 151, 284 Mirbeau, Octave, 298, 302 Moltke, Kuno von, Marshal, 259, 295 Monet, Claude, 132,185, 188, 193, 194, 202, 210, 259, 260 Monfreid, Georges Daniel de, 10 Moore, George, 20, 299-300, 313 Montalembert, Charles de, 76 Montejasi-Cicerale, Camilla, 153 Montejasi-Cicerale, Elena, 153 Montesquiou-Fesenzac, Robert de, 303 Monfreid, Georges-Daniel de, 11 Morbilli, Edmondo, 88, 89-90, 159, 160 More, Thomas, 3 Moreau, Frédéric, 97 Moreau, Gustave, 11-12, 71, 73-82, 84-85, 102, 110, 143, 146, 148, 163, 303 Morisot, Berthe, 9, 22, 149, 151-55, 172, 186, 207, 210, 260, 267, 270, 303, 308 Morisot, Edma, 149, 151, 152-54, 186 Morisot, Mme, 149, 267, 270 Morisot, Tiburce, 154, 267 Morisot, Yves, 149, 151, 153-55 Morny, Auguste Duc de, 121,199 Morny, Mme de, 140 Murat, Joachim-Napoléon, 37-38 Murillo, Esteban, 60 Musset, Alfred de, 152 Musson, Célestine, 35, 42, 45-48, 52 Musson, Estelle, 44 Musson, Germain, 35, 45, 46, 47 Musson, Michel, 100, 191 Nadar, 167, 209 Nanteuil, Robert, 56 Napoleon, see Bonaparte, Napoleon

379

Napoleon III, see Bonaparte, LouisNapoléon Nattier, 56 Navagero, Andrea, 72, 169 Newton, Alfred P., 126 Neyt, Sabine, 313 Niaudet, Alfred, 54, 294-95 Ninos, King, 98-99 Nocret, Jean, 104 Norvins, Mr de, 307 Nouredda, 231 Offenbach, 54, 167, 203 Ollivier, Emile, 149 Onnes, 98-99 Orléans, Gaston d’, 102, 105, 144 Orléans, Louis-Philippe d’, bourgeois King, 41, 42, 46, 48, 51, 104, Orléans, Mademoiselle d’, 93-107, 144 Orléans, Philippe d’, Monsieur, 4748 Orléans, Philippe d’, Regent, 48 Ostade, Adriaen van 56, 61, 201, 273 Ottin, Léon, fils, 283 Ottin, Léon, père, 283-84 Oudry, Alphonse, 199 Overbeck, Franz, 76 Pagans, Lorenzo, 43, 155, 159, 223, 226, 270, 307 Pagnol, Marcel, 199 Panini, Giovani Paolo, 20 Paolo, 98 Pascal, Blaise, 78 Pascal, Mr, 85 Pastoret, Marquis de, 307 Pater, Jean-Baptiste, 56, 226 Paulin, Paul, 307 Pearl, Cora, 167 Peiresc, Nicolas, 144 Perronneau, Jean-Baptiste, 307 Petit, Georges, 223 Phaedra, 98 Philippe de Champaigne, 59 Pilet, Louis-Marie, 159, 226

380 Pissarro, Camille, 9, 11, 125, 149, 175, 208, 210, 212, 253, 259, 260, 269, 273-83, 284, 292-93, 296, 304 Pissarro, Lucien, 208, 277, 304 Pleyel, Marie, 157 Plumaire, 305 Plutarch, 95-96 Pompadour, Mme de, 156 Ponce, J.B., 60 Pontillon, Adolphe, 151 Poussin, Nicolas, 186, 239, 241 Powell, William, 200 Poynter, Edward, 164 Pradier, James, 169, 171 Praet, Jules van, 150 Prévert, Jacques, 200 Prestridge, James, 191 Privat d’Anglemont, Alexandre, 202 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 39, 279, 296 Prud’hon, Pierre-Paul, 56, 60 Proust, Antonin, 10, 149, 185 Proust, Marcel, 303-4 Puvis de Chavannes, 10, 149, 152, 154, 155, 284, 294 Raczynski, 76 Rambouillet, Madame de, 105 Raphael, 60, 65, 72, 74, 75, 76, 169, 195 Raven, John, 126 Reclus, Onésime, 114, 136 Redon, Odilon, 302 Redouté, Pierre-Joseph, 147 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn, 56, 57, 60, 62, 65, 68, 71-73, 80, 82, 87, 90, 147, 164, 193, 195, 226, 273, 275, 315 Renoir, Auguste, 9, 17, 57, 58, 149, 193, 194, 203, 209, 210, 226, 259, 269, 298, 307 Renoir, Edmond, 209 Retz, 102 Reyer, Ernest, 50-51 Reynière, Grimod de la, 246-47 Reynolds, Joshua, 56

Index Richelieu, Cardinal, 47 Riegl, Alois, 193 Rigaud, Hyacinthe, 56 Rimbaud, Arthur, 189 Rio, Alexis-François, 76 Ristori, Adelaide, 93 Rivière, Georges, 203 Robert, Hubert, 56 Robert le Diable, 114, 231-32, 271 Robespierre, Augustin, 54 Robespierre, Maximilien, 52, 54 Rochefort, Henri de, 260, 269 Rodin, Auguste, 247, 303 Rodriguez, Léonie, 54 Rogers, Ginger, 199 Rothenstein, William, 133 Rothschild, Baron James de, 167 Rouart, Alexis, 261, 270, 311 Rouart, Ernest, 9 Rouart, Henri, 54, 107, 143, 241, 261, 270-71, 277, 283, 306 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 82 Rubens, Pieter-Paul, 56, 71, 77, 80, 144, 160, 275 Ruelle, Mr, 88, Rüstow, Wilhelm F. , 294 Rutté, Mme de, 272 Sagot, Clovis, 199 Saint-Arroman, Raoul de, 273-74 Sainte-Beuve, 104 Saint-Léon, Arthur, 231 Saint-Simon, 296 Salomon, Manette, 96-97 Sand, George, 152, 184 Sandoz, 248 Saskia, 315 Savoy, Francis-Thomas of, 144 Savoy, Victor-Emmanuel, Duke of, 103 Scheffer, Ary, 45 Schnetz, Jean-Victor, 72-73 Scholderer, Otto, 193, 203 Schumann, Robert, 226 Schwiter, Baron, 307 Scott, Walter, 119 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 105

Mapping Degas Semiramis, 92-107 Severn, Arthur, 126 Seurat, Georges, 11, 13, 302 Shakespeare, William, 3 Sickert, Walter, 7, 133, 303 Sieyès, 252 Signorelli, Luca, 77, Sisley, Alfred, 210 Smith, John, 160 Snyders, Frans, 78 Sorel, Georges, 305 Soutzo, Grégoire, 26, 55, 58-59, 119 Spenser, Edmund, 3 Steen, Jan, 56 Stendhal, 104 Stevens, Alfred, 124, 149, 150-51, 165, 203 Stevens, Arthur, 150 Stevens, Catherine, 151 Stevens, Joseph, 150 Stevens, Marie, 161 Stratonice, 98 Straus, Emile, 303 Straus, Geneviève, 303-4 Stuart, Mary, 93 Taine, Hyppolite, 250-53 Talma, François, 40, 45 Tardieu, Dr, 96 Taylor, Baron, 189, 284 Tempelaere, 199 Teniers, David, 59 Thérésa, 146, 280 Thiebault-Sisson, François, 239 Thiers, Adolphe, 48, 73, 262-63 Thion, 270 Thoré, Théophile, 160, 186 Tintoretto, Jacopo, 56 Tissot, James, 125, 148, 164-66, 192, 197-98, 207, 228, 262, 265 Titian, 63, 65, 74 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 9, 10, 164 Tourny, Joseph, 73, 77, 84 Trochu, General, 259 Urfé Geneviève d’, 147

381

Valernes, Evariste de, 148, 169-70, 303 Valéry, Paul, 7, 9, 11, 36, 39, 42, 62, 237, 239, 240, 254, 302, 306, 314 Valpinçon, Claire, 114, 267 Valpinçon, Edouard, 62-63 Valpinçon, Henri, 123 Valpinçon, Hortense, 133, 267 Valpinçon, Paul, 54, 58, 62, 118, 123, 133, 267 Vasari, Giorgio, 2, 61, 174 Velázquez, Diego, 21, 56, 71, 72, 78, 82, 163, 182 Vellay, Julie, 259 Verdi, Giuseppe, 226 Verlaine, Paul, 189 Vermeer, Johannes, 267 Vernet, Horace, 45 Veronese, Paolo, 73, 74, 78, 82 Verrocchio, 78 Veuillot, Louis, 294 Vigny, Alfred de, 92-93 Villard, Nina de, 228 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène, 306 Vizetelly, Ernest, 146-47, 161, 166 Vollard, Ambroise, 7, 9, 10, 11, 57, 107, 199, 200, 201, 211, 254, 310-11, 314 Vorsterman, Lucas, 144 Wael, Cornelis de, 72, 169 Wael, Lucas de, 72, 169 Wagner, Richard, 146, 226, Wallenstein, Albert de, 144 Watteau, Antoine, 56, 159, 160, 186, 226 Wellington, Duke of, 132 Weyden, Rogier van der, 313 Weyl, 199 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 57, 124, 130, 133, 151, 164, 185, 186, 189, 190, 194, 203, 207, 210, 226, 303 Wilde, Oscar, 133 Wilhelm, Kaiser of Prussia, 262, 295

382 William, the Conqueror, 114, 119 William of Jumièges, 122 William of Malmesbury, 122 William of Worcester, 114 Winckelmann, Johann-Joachim, 76

Index Wolff, Albert, 209 Zacharian, Zacharie, 148 Zola, Emile, 3, 96, 119, 149, 189, 193, 203, 248