DANCING GIRL FASTENING HER SHOE · EDGAR DEGAS
The work of Degas may be sorted into four main groups—the racing series, the theatrical studies, the drawings of the nude, and a few landscapes. From many points of view the scenes of the coulisses come first. Superb in draughtsmanship, they represent the life of the theatre in a way it has never been represented before. In one we see shivering girls rehearsing upon a cold cheerless stage lit by a few gas jets; in another the première danseuse quivering upon tiptoe amidst the frenzied plaudits of an excited audience. Degas reproduces the atmosphere with a marvellous precision, which only those engaged in the busy turmoil behind the curtain can fully judge. Upon these scènes de théâtre will rest his fame, for humankind is never likely to tire of such vivid renderings of a life always fascinating to the outside world.
Degas is not a countryman, and cannot be classed amongst sportsmen, or lovers of horseflesh. His jockeys and racehorses are highly extolled, but with animals he has not always succeeded. It is not sufficient to be a great artist in order to convey convincing impressions of sporting scenes. An artist must have the whole spirit of sport thoroughly engrained in his nature before he can properly represent it. Apart from the city, Degas is out of his element, and this is very apparent in the landscapes he has painted during the last eight years. The glamour of the fields and hedges does not touch his soul. Rural life he finds dull, and naturally his essays in landscape painting are somewhat painful. He has not the temperament which can faithfully interpret the poetry of the countryside, and is more at home in the purlieus of the opera or upon the asphalte of the boulevards.
Degas is a realist, and his subjects are for the most part exceedingly trivial in selection. After racehorses and ballet-dancers, he loves to depict buxom ladies of the lower classes engaged in personal ablution. It is extraordinary that the pupil of Ingres, the painter of La source, should create such appalling creatures. The most plausible apology comes from Mr. George Moore. The nude, he writes, has become well-nigh incapable of artistic treatment. Even the more naïve are beginning to see that the well-known nymph exhibiting her beauty by the borders of a stream can be endured no longer. Let the artist strive as he will, he will not escape the conventional; he is running an impossible race. Broad harmonies of colour are hardly to be thought of; the gracious mystery of human emotion is out of all question—he must rely on whatever measure of elegant drawing he can include in his delineation of arms, neck, and thigh; and who in sheer beauty has a new word to say? Since Gainsborough and Ingres, all have failed to infuse new life into the worn-out theme. But cynicism was the great means of eloquence of the Middle Ages; and with cynicism Degas has again rendered the nude an artistic possibility. The critic then describes these works in most sympathetic phrases. Three coarse women, middle-aged and deformed by toil, are perhaps the most wonderful. One sponges herself in a tin bath; another passes a rough nightdress over her lumpy shoulders, and the touching ugliness of this poor human creature goes straight to the heart. Then follows a long series conceived in the same spirit. “Hitherto,” says Degas, “the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience, but these women of mine are honest, simple folk, unconcerned by any other interests than those involved in their physical condition.” In another phrase he gives you his point of view, “it is as if you looked through a keyhole.”
Descendant of Poussin and Ingres (when Ingres fell down in the fit from which he never recovered, it was his pupil who carried him out of his studio), Degas worships drawing, and line is with him a cult. Japanese art has helped to mould his style, as it influenced many of the Impressionists. His oil-paintings, though for the most part correct in draughtsmanship, are frequently wiry and academic in technique. Colour was never his strong point, and it is in his pastels that we find the achievement of his life. In a masterly essay on this artist, Thèodore Duret writes: “Degas has proved once more that, with genius, subject is a secondary matter, merely its opportunity, one may say. It is out of itself, out of its inner consciousness, that the poetry and the beauty discovered in its production are drawn. His work will thus remain one of the most powerful, the most complete, and the most instinct with vitality amongst that of the masters of the nineteenth century.”
Of Degas personally little is known. He comes of an old bourgeoise family, and at one time it is said that he possessed considerable financial means, which he sacrificed in order to save a brother from financial disaster. Although seventy years of age he still works with excessive labour at the art over which he has gained such a mastery. Scorning wealth, publicity, and popularity, he lives a life of complete isolation, dispensing with friends, able to more than hold his own against enemies.
DANCING GIRL · E. DEGAS
He has had two pupils whose names stand out prominently in the art of to-day, the American artist Miss Mary Cassatt (referred to elsewhere in this volume) and the caricaturist Forain. Degas has always had a bitter wit, the dread of his contemporaries, and many of his sayings have passed into history. During the height of the battle which raged around the Impressionists during the seventies, he remarked concerning the academic painters and critics: “On nous fusille, mais on fouille nos poches,” or, in other words, “They cover us with injuries, yet they make use of our ideas.” In him Whistler met his match. “My dear friend,” he said once to that great artist, “you conduct yourself in life just as if you had no talent at all.” Upon another occasion, speaking of Whistler when the latter was having a number of photographic portraits taken, he observed sarcastically, “You cannot talk to him; he throws his cloak around him—and goes off to the photographer.” It was not likely that two such spirits would appreciate each other.