Impressionist Quartet

The Intimate genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt

Jeffrey Meyers

• Publisher: Southbank Publishing
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781904915515
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In this book, Jeffrey Meyers follows the lives of four Impressionist painters whose rebellious work was scorned by the critics and derided by their contemporaries. The French art establishment dismissed them altogether and at the time their sold for very little. Impressionist Quartet describes the relationships between these artists and how they struggle emotionally and intellectually to create a new way of seeing and representing the world.

III. Edgar Degas

Ten

Great Draftsman, 1834-1865

I

Edgar Degas—a quintessential Parisian who lived his entire life in the same part of the city—had an exotic background. Both his grandfathers had led adventurous lives. They escaped from bloody revolutions, ventured abroad and earned their fortunes in foreign cities. His father was born in Naples, his mother in New Orleans. The family name was originally written with the noble particle, De Gas. Edgar was the first to democratize the spelling and signed his works with one word, Degas. His paternal grandfather, Hilaire De Gas, the son of a modest baker, was born in 1770. During the French Revolution, when food was scarce and currency unstable, he built his fortune by speculating in grain and changing money. Paul Valéry wrote of his dubious activities: “one day in 1793, while conducting business at the Corn Exchange, which at that time was at the Palais Royal, a friend came up behind him and whispered, ‘Clear out! … Run for your life…. The [revolutionary police] are at your house.’” He fled to Naples with part of his fortune, opened a bank and became wealthy enough to buy a vast palazzo in the city and a summer villa on the outskirts of town in Capodimonte.

Degas painted a portrait of the distinguished eighty-seven-year-old gentleman, seated on a striped beige couch, firmly gripping a gold-topped cane that rests on his crossed legs. He wears a high white collar and black cravat, white waistcoat and long black coat. His unruly white hair partly covers his balding head and mutton-chop whiskers run along his jaws. His face is ruddy, his nose is long, his lips are thin. His expression is solemn and conveys the impression of an aging but still forceful personality.

Degas’ father, Auguste, was born in 1807 and took over the family bank. Though a son-in-law called him “a perfect model of apathy and egotism,” Edgar remembered him as “a very gentle, very distinguished, very kind man, witty, and above all devoted to music and painting.”1 He also did an affectionate portrait of his father at sixty-four (three years before his death), leaning forward on a chair and listening intently to Lorenzo Pagans singing Spanish songs and playing the guitar. (Mme. Morisot heard the same popular musician at Manet’s “at home”.) The square-faced, rugged-featured Pagans has bushy hair parted in the middle and a long drooping mustache over his half-opened lips. Auguste, with white mustache and balding head framed by the open music on the piano, has a gentle, sensitive face. Pagans’ fingers play the guitar; Auguste’s fingers, right next to them, are sympathetically interlaced. Completely absorbed in the melody, he stares meditatively into the distance.

Edgar’s paternal grandfather, Germain Musson, had fled the Caribbean uprisings in Santo Domingo, led by the black Haitian leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, and settled among the French-Creole families in New Orleans in 1809. Edgar’s mother, Célestine Musson, was born there in 1815. When his wife died young in 1819, leaving five children, including the young Célestine, he moved to Paris but maintained his business in Louisiana. He invested in silver mines in Mexico, and was killed there in 1853 when his coach overturned.

Degas’ parents were married in 1832 and in fourteen years had seven children, of whom five survived. Edgar, born in Paris on July 19, 1834, was the oldest, followed by Achille in 1838, Thérèse in 1840, Marguerite in 1842 and René in 1845. He was very close to his siblings, and his two brothers would cause him considerable grief. His mother died in 1847, at the age of thirty-two, “evidently worn out by childbearing, perhaps fatigued by an almost nomadic existence, quite certainly unhappy, and probably still dreaming of [youthful] winter nights of dancing and flirting. Edgar was then thirteen years old.” Though his parents were unhappily married, like the older Manets, Edgar was deeply attached to his father and devoted to the memory of his mother. The death of his mother, the extinction of her pure and selfless love, left Degas with a permanent sense of loss, and made him feel both guilty and bitter. His anger and sense of abandonment would later contribute to his suspicion of and hostility to women.

In 1845, aged eleven, Edgar entered the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, one of the best in France, and spent the next eight years there. The school’s rigorous military discipline, decrepit buildings and desolate atmosphere came as a shock to boys who’d been coddled at home. In winter they suffered from “convulsive shivering, stiff joints, chapped skin, chronic chilblains and—in the crowded, overheated study rooms equipped with stoves—an unforgettable dunghill smell compounded of January mud, unwashed bodies, and stale food.” The prison-like school “even had cells for solitary confinement, which had held political prisoners during the Reign of Terror. When banished to a punishment cell, the pupil had to do 1,500-1,800 Latin lines a day.”2 Somehow, men of genius emerged from these Spartan conditions, typical of the era. Degas’ distinguished predecessors included Molière, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Delacroix, and the infamous Robespierre.

The biographer of Baudelaire—who was actually expelled from the school— wrote that “the fees were high, which meant that [his] schoolfellows were for the most part the scions of the landed aristocracy and the sons of wealthy industrialists or of well-paid members of the legal profession. A number of the boarders came from the families of planters and merchants settled in the French colonies.” The conservative critic Maxime du Camp, an embittered graduate, condemned the school’s harsh regime and recalled that it had warped his personality: “The college is alleged to build character; I did not perceive anything of the sort, but I did see that it made me become bad-tempered, estranged, deceitful.”

The students were awakened at 5:30, and the day was long. They had to remain silent during meals while a fellow-pupil read passages from history books. The curriculum was narrow, with a heavy emphasis on Greek and Latin as well as history and literature, mathematics and modern languages (Edgar studied German). The teaching carefully excluded, Valéry observed, “anything to do with the body, the senses, the sky, the arts, or social life.” There were forty-five students in each of the rather large classes, and thirty-eight boys slept in each dormitory. With few outings or visits home, the masters, like tutors or parental stand-ins, had great influence. Their “term reports listed each pupil’s religious duties, assessed his morals, conduct, character, work, progress and position.”

Degas, the best educated of all the Impressionists, derived two great benefits from Louis-le-Grand. He formed close, lifelong friendships with several of his schoolmates: Paul Valpinçon, Ludovic Halévy, Henri and Alexis Rouart, and he developed a love of literature. He could masterfully quote long passages from his favorite writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: La Rochefoucauld, La Fontaine, Pascal, Racine, Saint-Simon and especially the Philosophes: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot—as well as his near-contemporary, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Degas, “with his skepticism, his sense of irony, his worldliness, and his scorn for class distinctions,” remained a man of the Enlightenment.3

Like Manet with Couture and Morisot with Guichard and Corot, Degas studied intermittently for four years with Louis Lamothe, an incisive, dedicated draftsman, who’d been a pupil of the greatly admired Ingres. Degas drew from the nude in the mornings and copied in the Louvre in the afternoons. A former student described the ineffectual Lamothe as “a poor man fated for misfortune, who was prevented by his timid nature and by his general misery from revealing his capacity as he should have.” Degas soon outgrew his tuition. In a letter to the painter Gustave Moreau he mocked Lamothe’s personal weaknesses and called him “more idiotic than ever.”

Degas was greatly encouraged (as Manet had been with Delacroix) by visiting the studio of Ingres, the great neoclassical draftsman. In a favorite anecdote that he never tired of repeating and embellishing, Ingres praised his early efforts and told him “never work from nature. Always from memory, or from the engravings of the masters…. Draw lines, young man, draw lines; whether from memory or after nature. Then you will be a good artist.” This excellent advice suited his own talent and convictions. Degas and his friend were about to leave the studio when the master dramatically fainted: “Ingres bowed very deeply; and in doing so, he was seized with dizziness and fell on his face. When they lifted him, his face was covered with blood. Degas washed him and then hurried to the Rue de l’Isle to find Mme. Ingres.” In other versions of the story, Degas, alert and ready when Ingres began to reel, caught him before he fell, and later proudly boasted: “I’ve held Ingres in my arms.”4

Degas followed Ingres in his willingness to work obsessively on a particular painting. Ingres observed:

It’s true that I often scrape out my work and begin again … but I cannot, really, do otherwise…. I’d rather make one painting well than ten mediocrities. Then there’ll be a reward for all the late nights and sacrifices …. Most of these works, which I love because of their subjects, seem to me worth the trouble to make them better, in repeating or retouching them…. Should an artist hope to leave a name to posterity, then he could never do enough to render his works more beautiful and less imperfect.

Degas also shared Ingres’ belief that an artist should sacrifice social life and devote himself to work. “I’ll shut myself up at home,” Ingres insisted, “to lead finally a life which, anyhow, I like, retired, calm, entirely disinterested, my last moments given over to the love of art.” In his book on Great Draughtsmen, Jakob Rosenberg placed Degas in the great tradition of French artists who’d perfected the line and called him “the one outstanding figure of the nineteenth century, perhaps the only one who can follow Watteau [and Ingres] without giving us a feeling of decline.”5

II

Italy also had a great influence on the young Degas. With close family ties and sufficient wealth to travel and study, he spent nearly three years, from 1856 to 1859, in Naples, Rome and Florence. Degas also journeyed through central Italy—to Viterbo, Orvieto, Perugia, Assisi and Arezzo—and learned color and line by copying hundreds of Old Masters in museums. He lived mainly with his family in Naples and painted several portraits of his relatives. A major port, beautifully situated on the Bay and within sight of Mount Vesuvius, Naples was then the largest city in Italy. He spoke the Neapolitan dialect fluently and with an authentic accent. He loved Italian opera and the music of Domenico Cimarosa, and while painting he would entertain his models by singing Neapolitan songs. His interest in Italy later led to friendships with several popular, second-rank Italian painters who had settled in Paris: Giuseppe de Nittis, Giovanni Boldini and Federico Zandomeneghi (a comrade of Garibaldi).

In the 1850s, Italy was still a collection of small states, partly controlled by France and Austria. Degas returned to Naples from March to July 1860, just before the Risorgimento, the most significant political movement in modern Italian history. In May 1860 the popular general Guiseppe Garibaldi sailed from Genoa with a thousand red-shirted volunteers, landed at Marsala in western Sicily and liberated the island from the reactionary rule of the Bourbon king of Naples, Francis II. Garibaldi then marched up the west coast, defeated the Bourbon army and handed over southern Italy to the liberal King Victor Emmanuel II. He’d ruled the so-called Kingdom of Sardinia in Turin and became monarch of the united country in 1861. The revolution destroyed the Bourbons, and Italy was unified for the first time since the fall of the Roman empire. Degas’ brother-in-law took part in the Italian revolution, and Garibaldi was always a hero to Degas.

In his youth Degas was very different from the madly driven artist of his later years. His dolce far niente life in Italy gave him so much leisure that he was in danger of never starting, let alone finishing, his work. He was very fond of quoting a passage from Rousseau’s Confessions (1788) in which he praised the youthful need for itinerant indolence and wrote: “The idleness I love … is the idleness of a chil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Books by Jeffrey Meyers
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Edouard Manet
• II. Berthe Morisot
• III. Edgar Degas
• IV. Mary Cassatt
• Bibliography