20 The New York Reviewfound a surrogate domesticity through
the family life of his closest friends, in
particular Paul Valpinçon, the Rouart
brothers Henri and Alexis, Henri Le-
rolle, and the Halévys.
He also formed strong attachments
to artists of a younger generation (and
lesser talent)—such as Pierre- Georges
Jeanniot, Forain, and Louis Braqua-
val—and was an early admirer of Su-
zanne Valadon and Paul Gauguin.
With the sculptor Bartholomé, a pupil
of Jean- Léon Gérôme, in the late sum-
mer of 1890 he undertook an eccentric
three- week trip through Burgundy,
traveling in a tilbury carriage har-
nessed to a white horse, ostensibly to
visit the Jeanniots on their large estate
at Diénay par Is- sur- Tille.^7 (Their jour-
ney, “une promenade en voiture sans
raison,” as Bartholomé remembered
it, is recounted in thirty letters to var-
ious correspondents.) From this well-
documented expedition Degas would
harvest, two years later, the group of
twenty- five surpassingly strange, al-
most abstract, landscapes in pastel and
monotype that he exhibited at Durand-
Ruel’s gallery in September 1892 (and
again in October 1894), the only one-
man show in Paris that he permitted
during his lifetime. In these “imagi-
nary landscapes”—as Degas described
them to his sister Marguerite in Buenos
Aires—Bartholomé claimed to be able
to identify quite precisely many of the
sites they had visited en route to Diénay
two years earlier.In the 1890s Degas, encouraged by his
friend Stéphane Mallarmé, embarked
upon a series of sonnets, some twenty
in number, which Paul Valéry consid-
ered “of high and original quality.” In
1895 he experimented with photogra-
phy, corralling the Halévys and other
friends to sit for him, and in August
he transported his equipment to the
spa town of Mont- Dore in the Dor-
dogne, from which he supervised the
printing, retouching, and enlargement
of his plates by his supplier in Paris,
Guillaume Tasset. On August 15 Degas
sent Marguerite and her family a photo-
graphic kit with instructions for its use:I calculate that with one month and
a little patience, you’ll be able to
send me (instead of letters, if you
are hardworking) some good por-
traits of people and places, or even
of rooms. Wrap this correspon-
dence carefully: humidity is fatal.Degas’s growing prosperity—with
Monet, he was the best- selling of the
Impressionists in Durand- Ruel’s stable
of artists—also allowed him to indulge
his voraciousness (and discrimination)
as a collector. His chief passions were
the paintings and drawings of Ingres
and Delacroix, but also the graphic art
of Gavarni, Manet, and Mary Cassatt,
and the work of Gauguin in all media.
(Between 1898 and 1899 alone, Degas
spent an estimated 61,000 francs on
works for his collection.) At an auc-
tion in February 1895 to raise money
for Gauguin’s return to Tahiti, Degas
bought, among other things, Gauguin’s
copy of Manet’s Olympia, which he
had never seen. According to DanielHalévy, “He turned to his neighbors
and asked them, ‘Is it beautiful?’”
Around this time Degas seems to
have considered creating a museum
to house his collection, which would
expand to more than 1,100 works. As
early as March 1895 he had mentioned
this possibility to the painter Berthe
Morisot, who wanted to make sure he
included a work by her brother- in- law:
“If he founds a museum, he must choose
a Manet.” In March 1896 Degas entered
into discussions with the vice- president
of the Municipal Council of Paris, whom
he hoped to meet in Mont- Dore the fol-
lowing summer. As Reff notes, Degas
may have been inspired by the example
of the portraitist Léon Bonnat, whose
collection was to be housed in a museum
in Bayonne, on which construction had
begun in 1896. From 1897, Degas’s col-lection was shown on the second floor
(French style) of his three- story Paris
apartment at 37, rue Victor-Massé. The
English painter Walter Sickert recalled
threading his way with Degas, by can-
dlelight, through a “forest of easels
standing so close to each other that we
could hardly pass between them, each
one groaning under a life- size portrait
by Ingres, or holding early Corots.”
Given Degas’s distrust of the state and
distaste for public education in general,
it is not surprising that nothing came
of these discussions. He disliked the
Musée Gustave Moreau, which opened
in 1903, noting that it was so “truly sin-
ister” that “it might be a family vault.”
And he was unmoved by the pleas of
the painter, collector, and art historian
Étienne Moreau- Nélaton, who had do-
nated his collection of French paint-
ings and drawings—including Manet’s
Le déjeuner sur l’herbe—to the Louvre
in 1906. Moreau- Nélaton visited Degas
in his studio in December 1907 to re-
vive negotiations, assuring the painter
that he would be able to name his
own director should he leave his col-
lection to the state. For lack of space,
Moreau- Nélaton’s collection was being
presented at the neighboring Musée
des Arts Décoratifs, and Degas ended
the conversation by insulting the peti-
tioner: “For a start, your paintings are
not at all well shown there.”The most dramatic—and saddest—as-
pect of Degas in the 1890s relates to his
increasingly outspoken anti- Semitism
and his reaction to the efforts to reha-
bilitate Captain Albert Dreyfus, who
had been found guilty of espionage in
December 1894 and sentenced to life
imprisonment on Devil’s Island.^8 Asevidence tending to exonerate Drey-
fus and implicate the highest echelons
of the French military came to light in
1897, Degas’s relations with the Halévy
family became more and more fraught.
The Halévys’ elder son, Élie, noted in
November 1897, “I have a Jewish name,
even though I am Protestant.” (Degas
also harbored an irrational dislike of
Protestants.) The Halévys associated
with journalists and intellectuals com-
mitted to proving (and publicizing)
Dreyfus’s innocence. At their Thurs-
day dinner on November 25, 1897,
the day on which Le Figaro published
Émile Zola’s first article in support of
Dreyfus, Ludovic expressly forbade any
discussion of the topic (“Papa was very
annoyed, Degas very anti- Semitic”).
Although no one knew it at the time,
the last family dinner that Degas at-
tended at the Halévys took place on
January 13, 1898, the day on which
Zola’s “J’accuse” appeared on the
front page of L’Aurore. Their ebullient
younger guests, whose company Degas
usually relished, offended him with
their pro- Dreyfusard opinions. He
canceled the following week’s dinner
on the day itself, writing to Louise:You w i l l have to excuse me ton ig ht,
and I would rather tell you right
away that I am asking you to do so
for some time. You could not have
thought that I would have the heart
to continue being cheerful and en-
tertaining. The time for laughter is
over. You kindly introduced me to
these young people, but I constrain
them and they are unbearable to
me. Let me remain in my corner.
I’ll be happy there. There are many
good moments to remember.The decision must not have been
easy for Degas to take. Unaware of
this crisis, on the evening of January
20 nineteen- year- old Julie Manet—
another anti- Dreyfusard who would
contribute funds to La Libre Parole
for the repatriation of Jews to Jerusa-
lem—went to Degas’s apartment to
invite him to dinner. “We found him
so worked up into such a terrible state
against the Jews,” she noted in her
diary, “that we left without asking him
anything at all.” “To live alone, without
any family, it is really too hard,” he had
confided to Madame Giuseppe De Nit-
tis in May 1877. In his rupture with the
Halévys, Degas administered a self-
inflicted wound.
A riveting (and dispiriting) glimpse
of Degas in old age—increasingly
conservative, cantankerous, and alien-
ated—is provided in the diary of Count
Harry Kessler, the German patron and
impresario, for whom Vollard orga-
nized a dinner in the cellar of his gal-
lery in June 1907 so that Kessler could
meet the seventy- two- year- old painter.^9Attended also by the artists Forain,
José Maria Sert, and Pierre Bonnard,
the dinner was not a success. Degas,
who initially appeared to Kessler like
“an elegant grandfather... an apostle,
untouched by the world,” became agi-
tated when conversation turned to the
Bernheim family, who dealt in his work.
Referring to the father, Alexandre, who
had established the business, Degas ex-
claimed, “How can one chat with peo-
ple like that? Let’s see, with a Jewish
Belgian who is a naturalized French-
man! It’s as if one wished to speak with
a hyena, a boa. Such people do not be-
long to the same humanity as us.”
Kessler recorded that Degas’s most
deranged invective was reserved for
compulsory education:“It’s the Jews and the Protestants
who do that” [Degas said]...
Degas became completely angry,
thundering against the popular-
ization of art and the unrestrained
increase in exhibitions, pictures,
and artists. “Truly, with all of this,
the profession of artist is becoming
disgusting. Today one wants every-
one to have taste the same way one
has clothes, a vest, pants, boots. It’s
shameful! It’s come to where the
garrison in Paris has ordered that
each week a detachment of soldiers
should visit the Louvre under the
supervision of an officer! I wonder
a bit at what soldiers are supposed
to do in the Louvre, and under the
supervision of an officer? Is it not
shameful, shameful?”Amused and horrified in equal mea-
sure, Kessler left the dinner concluding
that the artist was “a deranged and ma-
niacal innocent.”
A kinder, more affectionate Degas
does emerge in his letters, but rarely,
and notably in those to his friend and
fellow artist Valernes, whom he had
known since the mid- 1850s, and next
to whom he is shown in his self- portrait
Degas and Évariste de Valernes (1865;
see illustration on page 18). Writing to
Valernes on October 26, 1890, Degas
begged forgiveness:I am going to apologize for some-
thing that recurs often in your
conversation and even more so in
your thoughts: namely, throughout
our long artistic relationship, my
having been or having appeared
to be hard on you. I was singularly
so on myself, as you must remem-
ber since you reproached me for
it and were astonished that I had
such little self- confidence. I was, or
appeared to be, hard on everyone,
due to a habitual brutality born
of my self- doubt and bad temper.
I felt so poorly made, so poorly
equipped, so weak, and yet it
seemed to me that my calculations
on art were so right.According to Degas’s first cataloger,
Pierre- André Lemoisne, “He who al-
ways had difficulty revealing himself in
his letters wrote often to Valernes with
abandon and affection.”(^7) On the accommodating and amena-
ble Bartholomé, see Thérèse Burollet,
Albert Bartholomé, 1848–1928 (Paris:
Arthéna, 2017).
(^8) For what remains the best introduc-
tion, see Linda Nochlin, “Degas and
the Dreyfus Affair: A Portrait of the
Artist as an Anti- Semite,” in The
Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice,
edited by Norman L. Kleeblatt (Univer-
sity of California Press, 1987). Degas
was joined by Renoir (and to a lesser
degree Cézanne) in their at times vio-
lent anti- Dreyfusard positions; Monet
and Pissarro were ardent supporters of
Dreyfus’s cause. Degas and Renoir both
broke with Pissarro over the Dreyfus
Affair.
(^9) Fifteen years before Kessler’s diaries
were translated into English in 2011,
the episode was first published in these
pages by James Fenton. See “Degas in
the Evening,” The New York Review,
October 3, 1996. Fenton’s transcrip-
tion is more complete than the entry
in Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of
Count Harry Kessler, 1880 –1918, ed-
ited and translated by Laird M. Easton
(Knopf, 2011), pp. 412–415.
Edgar Degas: Mlle Bécat aux
Ambassadeurs, circa 1875–
Pr
ivate Collect
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