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DEGAS, EDGAR (1834–1917)
French painter, draftsman, pastellist, sculptor, and
photographer
In the mid-1890s, after making the majority of his
paintings and experimenting with pastel and monotype,
Degas briefl y focused on photography, producing a
small body of fascinating pictures that were never
exhibited during his lifetime. Unrecognized as part of
his creative output and therefore excluded from the in-
ternationally renowned atelier sales of 1918 and 1919,
much of Degas’s photographic oeuvre may have been
dispersed, discarded, or destroyed after his death. The
majority of his surviving photographs are fi gure stud-
ies, self-portraits, and portraits of his intimate circle
of friends—the poets Stéphane Mallarmé and Emile
Verhaeren, the painter Auguste Renoir, Degas’s brother
René, and the Halévy family—in settings suggestive of
realms more psychological than physical.
While its infl uence on his painting is a much debated
topic, Degas was certainly aware of photography from
the beginning of his career. He posed for carte-de-visite
portraits, studied the stop-action photographs of Ead-
weard Muybridge in the late 1870s, bought photographic
reproductions of other painters’ work, and had photo-
graphs made of his own canvases. In 1885, a decade
before he himself took up the camera, Degas set up an
amusing tableau-vivant parody of Ingres’s Apotheosis
of Homer before the camera of a local photographer,
Walter Barnes, in the seaside resort of Dieppe.
Not until the summer and fall of 1895, however, did
Degas take up photography as part of his own artistic
practice, embracing it with passion and enthusiasm. By
then, the motifs in his paintings and pastels—dancers,
women at their toilette, horses, and rare forays into
landscape—were established, as were his untraditional
viewpoints, lighting effects, and compositions. One
might imagine that Degas would have adopted as his
own the accidental cropping, instantaneity, casual
compositions, and texture of modern life that were fast
becoming common characteristics of amateur photog-
raphy a half-dozen years after the introduction of the
hand-held Kodak camera. In fact, however, the opposite
was true. He worked in a far more deliberate fashion,
using a larger tripod-mounted camera and 9 × 12 cm
gelatin dry-plate negatives, and he carefully posed and
lit his subjects for exposures that lasted two to three
minutes. Just as he rejected the snapshooter’s casual
approach to the medium, he also eschewed the accepted
standards of professional photographic practice, the
decreed fashions of the portrait studio, and the aesthet-
ics of the “Photo-Club” artist. Instead, as had been the
case with paint, pastel, and sculpture, his unorthodox
technique was driven exclusively by the effect he wished
to achieve.
Letters written by Degas in August 1895 from the
spa town of Mont-Dore to his photographic supplier
and printer in Paris, Guillaume Tasset, reveal the in-
tensity of his engagement with the mechanics and
chemistry of the medium. On occasion, he developed
and contact-printed his own negatives, and even when
relying on Tasset and Tasset’s daughter Delphine for
photo-finishing and enlarging, Degas specified the
cropping, tonality, and contrast of his prints. Despite
the technical failures he encountered, Degas tried to
make photography conform to his vision, for example
asking Tasset for tips that would help him photograph
close to nightfall. “Daylight gives me no problem,” he
declared. “What I want is diffi cult—the atmosphere of
lamps and moonlight.” With his eyesight gradually fail-
ing and the precious daylight hours reserved for working
on pastels and sculptures, Degas preferred to photograph
in the evening, when he could impose greater control
over the lighting. Throughout the autumn and winter of
1895, Degas dined frequently at the home of his close
friends Ludovic and Louise Halévy and their sons Elie
and Daniel. Many such evenings concluded with long
photographic sessions, vividly described in Daniel
Halévy’s journal: “Degas raised his voice, became
dictatorial, gave orders that a lamp be brought into the
little parlor and that anyone who wasn’t going to pose
should leave....These days, all his friends speak of him
with terror. If you invite him for the evening you know
what to expect: two hours of military obedience.” The
photographs made on those remarkable evenings and
preserved by the Halévy family and their descendants
now constitute the bulk of Degas’s known work in the
medium.
Degas found a powerful spiritual content in photo-
graphs, independent of artistic intention or appreciation,
and his activity in the medium seems closely related