Edgar DEGAS

Edgar Degas (1834-1917): Biography, Etchings, Monotypes and Lithographs

Edgar Degas was born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas in Paris on 19 July 1834 and died there on 27 September 1917. Celebrated for his dancers, racecourses and women bathing, and a mainstay of the Impressionist exhibitions, he was also one of the most inventive printmakers of the nineteenth century. By the reckoning of the Paris dealers Paul Prouté, his output comprises some fifty copperplate prints, nearly twenty lithographs and more than two hundred monotypes – a small body of work, but one he reworked obsessively, state after state.

At present Le Coin des Arts holds a single item connected with Degas: an exhibition poster for the Galerie de poche, dated 1962. It is a document of the artist’s posthumous reputation rather than an original print, and is described as such. The gallery follows the market for his etchings and lithographs and offers them when good impressions with a sound history become available; use the ‘follow the artist’ button to be notified.

A Parisian education under the shadow of Ingres

The eldest of five children, Degas was the son of the banker Augustin De Gas and of Célestine Musson, a Creole from New Orleans, who died when he was thirteen. He attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, took his baccalauréat in 1853 and enrolled half-heartedly in the law faculty. In 1855 he met Ingres, whose advice to draw lines stayed with him for life, and in April entered the École des Beaux-Arts under Louis Lamothe. From July 1856 he spent some three years in Italy, beginning studies for The Bellelli Family while staying with relatives in Naples in 1858. His earliest prints, such as the etched Self-Portrait of 1857, look to Rembrandt and Ingres; the following decade brought etched portraits of his friend Édouard Manet (1864-65) and a Salon debut in 1865.

London, Liverpool and New Orleans

Serving in the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War, Degas discovered during rifle practice that his eyesight was defective – a worry for the rest of his life. In 1871 he was probably in London to see Paul Durand-Ruel’s exhibition of modern French art at 168 New Bond Street. In October 1872 he sailed from Liverpool with his brother René to New Orleans, returning in March 1873. Out of that visit came A Cotton Office in New Orleans, bought in 1878 by the museum at Pau: the first of his works to enter a public collection. His father’s death in 1874 exposed René’s heavy debts; Degas sold his house and inherited collection to settle them and thereafter lived from his art.

The Impressionist years and ‘Le Jour et la Nuit’

Degas exhibited at seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886. In the mid-1870s, encouraged by Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic, he returned to etching and took up the monotype, an ink drawing on a metal plate run through the press, usually yielding a single impression; three groups of them were shown at the third exhibition in 1877. In 1879 he planned a journal of original prints, Le Jour et la Nuit, with Mary Cassatt, Camille Pissarro and Félix Bracquemond, teaching them soft-ground etching; it never appeared. From that moment date Mary Cassatt at the Louvre (1879-80), worked through nine states, and Leaving the Bath (1879), pushed through twenty-two. London began to see his work: Durand-Ruel showed seven pieces at Dowdeswell and Dowdeswell in spring 1884.

Later life: lithographs, photography and fading sight

From 1887 Degas sold through dealers rather than group shows. In September 1889 he travelled to Spain and Morocco with Giovanni Boldini. The transfer lithographs of After the Bath (1891-92) and a second campaign of monotypes, including landscapes, belong to the early 1890s, as does his passion for photography. In 1893 L’Absinthe caused a scandal when shown at the Grafton Galleries in London, where thirty-five of his works were included in a group exhibition in February 1905. The Dreyfus affair brought out an open antisemitism that cost him friendships. Forced in 1912 to leave the flat he had occupied for over twenty years, he virtually stopped working, and he died in Paris on 27 September 1917; he is buried in the family vault at Montmartre.

After 1917: the studio, the sales and British collections

Degas’s own collection was sold in Paris in March and April 1918. John Maynard Keynes attended and helped Sir Charles Holmes, director of the National Gallery, spend a government grant of £20,000, bringing thirteen paintings and eleven drawings to London. Some 150 sculptures found in the studio were cast in bronze by the Hébrard foundry from 1919; a complete set was later offered to the Museu de Arte de São Paulo by London’s Marlborough Gallery. In Britain, the landmark printmaking exhibition Edgar Degas: The Painter as Printmaker came to the Hayward Gallery under the Arts Council from 15 May to 7 July 1985, and Tate Britain explored his legacy in Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec (2005-06).

The prints: catalogues raisonnés and posthumous editions

Printmaking was, for Degas, private experiment, known in his lifetime mainly to fellow artists and collectors. He combined etching, aquatint, drypoint and soft ground, pulled countless trial proofs, and used lithography, often by transfer. Three catalogues matter. Loys Delteil devoted volume IX of Le Peintre-graveur illustré to him in 1919. Jean Adhémar and Françoise Cachin published Edgar Degas, gravures et monotypes (Paris, 1973), issued in English by Viking in 1974. The standard reference is now Sue Welsh Reed and Barbara Stern Shapiro, Edgar Degas: The Painter as Printmaker (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1984): ‘Reed & Shapiro 8, state iv/iv’ identifies the fourth and final state of the 1857 Self-Portrait. For monotypes, see Eugenia Parry Janis, Degas Monotypes (Fogg Art Museum, 1968).

Posthumous printings are the collector’s chief hazard. Ambroise Vollard acquired a group of cancelled plates before the artist’s death and published an edition around 1919 on Japan paper. In 1959 the dealer Frank Perls had further impressions pulled by Lacourière, blind-stamped ‘Frank Perls edition 1959’. For Vollard’s books La Maison Tellier (1934) and Mimes des courtisanes (1935), Maurice Potin engraved plates after Degas’s monotypes, described by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco as aquatint with roulette over photogravure: interpretative prints, not Degas’s own.

Collecting Degas prints: a buyer’s guide

Lifetime or posthumous? A trial proof pulled by Degas, a Vollard impression of about 1919 and a Perls impression of 1959 are three different objects at three different prices. See the printing.

State. Because Degas reworked his plates so often, a Reed & Shapiro number should always come with a state (for instance ‘iii/ix’), checked against the catalogue.

Marks and signature. Stamps, blind stamps and inscriptions must tally with the catalogue; later editions carry their own marks. See the signature.

Paper and condition. Check the paper against the stated edition, look for foxing, light-staining and trimmed margins, and choose conservation framing.

Provenance. A documented history matters most for sheets offered as lifetime impressions.

Pitfalls. Potin plates, art-book reproductions and exhibition posters are not original prints by Degas. Ask for technique, state, edition and catalogue number; our commitments are set out on the authenticity page.

The gallery selects Degas’s prints for quality of impression and accuracy of description. Explore also the prints of Odilon Redon, Paul Signac, Pablo Picasso – who owned a group of Degas’s brothel monotypes, now in the Musée Picasso – Jacques Villon and Henri Matisse, together with modern art and our etchings and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Loys Delteil, Le Peintre-graveur illustré, vol. IX, Edgar Degas, Paris, 1919 · Jean Adhémar and Françoise Cachin, Degas: The Complete Etchings, Lithographs and Monotypes, Viking, New York, 1974 · Sue Welsh Reed and Barbara Stern Shapiro, Edgar Degas: The Painter as Printmaker, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1984 (shown at the Hayward Gallery, London, 1985) · Eugenia Parry Janis, Degas Monotypes, Fogg Art Museum, 1968 · The Met – John Maynard Keynes and the 1918 Degas sale · NGV – The life of Degas · The Met – Mary Cassatt at the Louvre · National Gallery of Art – Self-Portrait, 1857 · FAMSF – Maurice Potin after Degas · Galerie Paul Prouté – Edgar Degas