Edgar degas

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Edgar Degas

In his letters from the United States in 1872-1873 , Degas petulantly complained at being cut off from life as he knew it in Paris . He keenly missed the nightly round of opera and theater , and upon his return , at a time when the best of his contemporaries had swung over to open-air painting , he focused his attention on typically Parisian scenes : the theater , both on stage and off , the cafy-concerts , the

ballet . Every figure he painted musicians , singers , dancers , spectators he caught from an unusual , a revealing angle , lit up from below in the crude glare of the footlights , or darkly silhouetted against a luminous background Degas made his canvas a screen on which he mirrored all the crisscrossing patterns of artificial lighting that accentuate features and bring out personality

The year 1868 saw his first full-fledged venture into this field Mademoiselle Fiocre in the Ballet "La Source . But still held in thrall as he was by the conventions of the studio , his eyes had not yet been opened to the vast possibilities of the entertainment world . Let there be no mistake the light playing over the three women here is not that of the stage , and in fact anyone ignorant of the picture 's title might well imagine the subject to have been taken from an Oriental tale . What Degas has done and the picture-title tells us as much is to draw on selected elements of a period ballet , turning them to account as he saw fit , and eliminating their specifically "theatrical " content . He thus proceeded in much the same way as Watteau , who got his raw material from the barnstorming Italian comedians of his day , only to lift the scenes from their stage context , setting them after his fancy in idyllic parks and gardens (G . GEFFROY , 1890

In the following year , very probably , Degas painted a picture whence all compromise was banished : The Orchestra at the Paris Opera , in which for the first time we see him striking out on a path that was to lead him far . Oddly enough , this picture was meant to be and is a portrait of one of the musicians in the opera orchestra , the bassoonist Dyiry Dihau , a close friend of Degas . But intent on doing away with the conventional portrait backgrounds of his time , the artist had already shown what he was after in previous portraits : he wanted to paint the model in the natural surroundings of his everyday life . What is Mademoiselle Fiocre if not the portrait of a dancer in the exercise of her profession , just as the Orchestra is a portrait of Dihau playing his bassoon at an actual performance ? The drawing of the latter canvas carries accuracy to a point rare even with Degas , while the color-scheme is warm , sustained perfectly attuned in every detail . But the composition is what really proves Degas ' originality . Not content to show...