Degas early works: portraits and horses
Degas is best known for his Paris Opera dancer and bather paintings. Before he settled on those subjects, returning continuously to them from the 1870s to the end of his active artistic life, he painted horses and portraits.
His equestrian studies often show Degas representing the horses’ fidgety impatience and coiled energy as they line up before a race. They point to his later central artistic obsession which he would return to endlessly in his ballerina and bathers series: how to represent the dynamism of movement on the flat, still surface of a canvas?
The self-portrait in the Paris Orsay Museum of a young Degas from 1855 is from before his residency in the Pigalle area of lower Montmartre. We see a serious self-absorbed young man. He has a condescending air and it looks as though the viewer is wasting his time, holding him back whilst he, with brush in hand, would prefer to be working.
Location: 13 Rue Victor Massé, 1859 – 1872/3, point 17
Degas traveled extensively during this early period with long stays in Italy where he had family ties. He made sketches and studies of his aunt, uncle and their family in Florence; the work formed the basis of his famous painting The Bellelli Family. The painting was finished in Paris in the 1860s and so can be associated with point 17.
In The Bellelli Family, we see a stiff, distant, taught and severe family portrait. Degas’ uncle by marriage is cut off from his family by a rigid line formed by the frame of the mirror, the fireplace and the leg of the table. Degas shows a family lacking solidarity or affection but in the portrait can we also see a reflection of his own dry, unbending, cool character? The painting can be seen in the Orsay Museum in Paris.
The new sport of horse racing in Paris
The demolition and remodeling of Paris by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s had imported the British pastime of horse racing onto the Parisian social scene. The newly opened hippodrome at Longchamp in the Bois de Boulogne was a popular meeting point. Seeing the horses close at hand in action brought Degas to the races.
Recent advances in photography had captured the range of improbable shapes that the galloping horse adopted. The rhythmic bunching and stretching of the animals bodies, the way they instinctively placed one leg on the ground before the other intrigued Degas. It led him to incorporate the realistic postures and attitudes of movement revealed by photography into his equestrian series and to look again at the human body too as it moved and balanced.
The hippodrome was an occasion to study the raw animal power of the horses and the attractive clashing colours of the jockey’s silks.
The restlessness of the horses and the weaving patterns of the jockey’s bright colours challenged Degas to consider how best to capture the instant of movement.
Race Horses in Front of the Stands
The At the Races, the Start from 1860-62 shows us some racehorses straining to get going and the jockeys’ silks caught in a pool of light.
Race Horses in Front of the Stands in the Orsay Museum, Paris is from the late 1860s.
The work is in essence: oil paint thinned with petroleum. The runny paint and watery colour helps to suggest a veil of thin high cloud as pale light floods through, bathing the ever irregular, individualistic horses, the jockeys and the spectators with diffused milky sunlight.
In the distance one of the jockeys has lost control of a horse as it momentarily bolts, whilst a smoking factory chimney reassures Degas that he is not far from the urban sprawl of the city. That chimney reminds us that the horse racing we are seeing here, despite its country connections, is an extension of the Parisian entertainment and social scene.
Portrait: A Woman Seated by a Vase of Flowers
A Woman Seated by a Vase of Flowers from 1865 shows a gigantic vase full of flowers positioned in the middle of the image. To the right of the scene, almost as an afterthought, is a woman gazing dreamily out of the frame, her hand drawn up to her cheek in reflection, her eyes, absent, recalling a memory or image.
The woman’s thoughts are elsewhere and a part of her body, because it is cropped Japanese-print style, is also elsewhere.
The flowers in the painting are beautiful and abundant but will soon fade; she too is young. Is that what Degas wants us to think?
That feeling of absence, distraction and isolation would be one that Degas would revisit in his haunting drink-sodden In a Café aka Absinthe picture of 1876 which I describe at point 4 the Nouvelle Athenes Café.
Degas is most famously the artist who grappled with the portrayal of movement. Here he shows the mood of a moment; the beauty of the flowers, the private thoughts of the woman.
The Opera Orchestra
The Opera Orchestra, in the Orsay Museum, Paris is from 1870. It shows a musician friend of Degas, Désiré Dihau the bassoonist, who features prominently at the front of the picture.
Degas has relegated what was to become one of his most important artistic themes, the opera ballerinas, to the back of the scene.
We see the girls’ lower-halves and dresses vividly lit by the gas footlights but their heads are cropped out. Looking closely to the left at the top of the picture we see that Degas has not flinched from including a realistic and telling detail as a gentleman patron/voyeur ogles the dancers’ legs.
All photographs © David Macmillan except: (1).
All Wikipedia photographic attribution courtesy of the Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons Attribution generator :
(1) Edgar Degas artist QS:P170,Q46373, Degas - Vor den Tribünen, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons
