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to his profound melancholy. In a desperate attempt to
bring back before his eyes his dying sister Marguerite,
who had moved hastily to Buenos Aires a half-dozen
years earlier, he shipped a camera and supplies to her
in August 1895 and beseeched her to send photographs
of herself, her family, and their home. Her death in Oc-
tober, just two years after that of their brother Achille,
deeply affected Degas. Photography provided him with
an activity that bound him to a surrogate family—the
Halévys—in a situation he could control, especially dur-
ing the evening hours when his mind would otherwise
have dwelled on the death and dispersal of his own fam-
ily. Degas’s most psychologically expressive portraits,
in which fi gures emerge from lugubrious surroundings,
are the product of this mournful period.
Among the most intriguing aspects of Degas’s work
are those few instances in which his strikingly idiosyn-
cratic photographs informed his paintings and pastels of
the 1890s. The Getty Museum’s Nude Drying Herself,
an extraordinary image of a nude model leaning on the
back of a chaise longue and twisting her body, served
as the basis for one of Degas’s major late canvases, the
Philadelphia Museum’s After the Bath (1896), and for
several smaller studies in pastel and charcoal. Equally
without parallel are three glass negatives that show a
dancer in various poses; these, too, served as direct mod-
els for dozens of drawings and pastels in the late 1890s,
and for one of Degas’s small statuettes. Their extraor-
dinary appeal lies in their unusual appearance—shades
of orange and red, with some portions reading as nega-
tive and others as positive—and in their treatment of a
central theme of his art with a formal structure, grace,
and intimacy that are uniquely his.
Only a single photograph, a portrait of eight- or
nine-year-old Claudie Léouzon le Duc, is documented
as having been made after Degas’s burst of activity in
- That this portrait was made in 1901 suggests
that he continued to use his camera from time to time,
even as his eyesight and enthusiasm waned. Degas’s
photographic equipment remained in his studio at the
time of his death in 1917.
Four photographs by Degas—two landscapes and two
negative-print copies of his paintings—were included
in the 1936 retrospective exhibition at the Pennsylvania
(now Phhiladelphia) Museum of Art, but his work in the
medium was otherwise relegated to illustrational pur-
poses until the 1980s, when it was included in two major
monographic surveys: “Degas: Form and Space” at the
Centre Culturel du Marais, Paris, in 1984, and “Degas”
at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, the
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and The Metro-
politan Museum of Art, New York, in 1988. Degas’s
photographs were the subject of a focused exhibition,
“Edgar Degas, Photographer,” at The Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art, New York, in 1998 and the Bibliothèque
nationale de France, Paris, in 1999, accompanied by a
catalogue raisonné of the same title.
Major holdings of Degas photographs are found at
the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, including many negatives and
prints from the Halévy family; and at the Bibliothèque
nationale de France, Paris, where Degas’s brother René
deposited archival material from the painter’s studio in- Other public institutions possessing photographs
by Degas are: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles;
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Mu-
seum of Modern Art, New York; The Fogg Art Museum,
Cambridge, Mass.; the Musée départemental Stéphane
Mallarmé, Vulaines-sur-Seine; the Bibliothèque litté-
raire Jacques Doucet, Paris; The Sterling and Francine
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.; The Achen-
bach Foundation for Graphic Arts, San Francisco; and
George Eastman House, Rochester.
Malcolm Daniel
Biography
Hilaire Germain Edgar De Gas was born July 19,
1834, the eldest son of banker Auguste De Gas and his
wife Celestine née Musson. He entered the studio of
Louis Lamothe, a pupil of Ingres, in 1854; attended the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1855–56; and traveled to Italy
1856–59 to draw, paint, and copy the Old Masters. He
was a founding member of the Impressionist group in
1874, and exhibited in seven of the eight Impressionist
exhibitions during the next dozen years, although his
subjects, style, and technique were at odds with the plein
air painters who constituted the majority of the group.
Degas briefl y experimented with photography late in
his career, principally in the summer and fall of 1895.
He died in Paris, September 27, 1917.See also: Kodak.Further Reading
Armstrong, Carol M., Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and
Reputation of Edgar Degas, Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1991.
Boggs, Jean Sutherland, et al., Degas, Paris: Galeries Nationales
du Grand Palais; Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada; New
York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988 (exhibition
catalogue).
Childs, Elizabeth, “Habits of the Eye: Degas, Photography, and
Modes of Vision,” in The Artist and the Camera: Degas to
Picasso, Dorothy Kosinski, ed., Dallas: Dallas Museum of
Art, 1999, 70–87 (exhibition catalogue).
Daniel, Malcolm, Eugenia Parry, and Theodore Reff, Edgar De-
gas, Photographer, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
1998 (exhibition catalogue); translated as Edgar Degas, pho-
tographe, Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1999.
Halévy, Daniel, Degas parle, Paris: La Palatine, 1960; revised