FRENCH IMPRESSIONISM
DEGAS, Edgar (Paris, 1834 – Paris, 1917)
Race Horses in a Landscape,
1894
Pastel sobre paper, 47.9 x 62.9 cm
Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza
Edgar Degas, like his colleague, Renoir was not at all averse to signing the works he completed, but, also like Renoir, he rarely dated them. This decision liberates his commentators and critics to propose sequences of works that can “order” his working process. Indeed, a good deal of the Degas literature in the past generation has been devoted to his working methods, and reading many of its most sophisticated authors is not unlike reading a detailed cook book or a “how-to” manual. This imbalance is not without justification, because the artist himself was all but obsessed with technical matters, inventing “modus operandi” for art making that are among the most complex and inventive in the entire history of Western art. Yet, it has created a condition in which Degas’ oeuvre is thought of in terms of sequences and series rather than as an oeuvre of separate, individual works with their own identity.
This masterpiece in pastel is surely one of those. Its evident signature and date have already been remarked on, and they indicate an unusual level of finish. This was surely intentional, as Degas was actively building his collection in the mid 1890s and was, hence, always in need of money to buy works of art by artists from El Greco to Gauguin. This pastel was purchased immediately from the artist by his dealer Durand-Ruel and sold quickly to the great American collector of Degas, Louisine Havemeyer, who had formed one of the great Degas collections in history. With its outdoor setting and its horserace subject, this beautiful pastel would fit wonderfully into the study or smoking room of a wealthy gentleman collector such as Horace Havemeyer. This is most likely precisely where it went.
Jean Sutherland Boogs wrote sensitively about this work in the monumental Degas catalogue produced by the Reunion des Musees Nationaux, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Metropolitan Museum in 1988–1989. She noted that it was made in Degas’ sixtieth year and also that it derived from another signed and dated pastel produced precisely ten years earlier, when the artist was fifty. Hence it has an elegiac quality, of being more a memory than an observed scene, and Boggs pointed to the fact that its landscape setting derived a good deal of its subtlety and mystery from the large group of landscape colour monotypes that Degas had exhibited at Durand-Ruel galleries the previous year. Where, we are forced to ask, are these horses racing_ Who are their spectators_ Why are they so elaborately and formally dressed if they are alone_ When we ask these questions, we realise how far we have come from the tradition of the outdoor horserace picture invented in England in the late 18th century and brought to France by Delacroix and Bonington in the 1820s. In these paintings, we see actual races with actual spectators set into landscapes that have little positive character of their own. Here, as Degas broods at the onset of his sixties, he sets these horses in a vast and empty mountainous landscape tinged pink by the rising or setting sun. There is a dark forested valley below them. Will some of them ride into it and disappear_
It is also interesting to note the brilliant hues that Degas used as if they are spices in an exotic visual stew. Although he had already become a brilliant colourist, he had only recently learned dramatic and new chromatic lessons from the Tahitian paintings of Paul Gauguin, at least one of which, The Moon and the Earth (New York, Museum of Modern Art), he had bought in November of 1893. How brilliant he was as collector to buy Gauguin just as he bought El Greco, Ingres, and Delacroix.
Richard R. Brettell.
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