Edgar Degas
Portrait de Ludovic Halévy.
1895

Name: Portrait de Ludovic Halévy.
Brand: Edgar Degas
Price: 27326.39 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Edgar DEGAS Paris 1834 † 1917 id. Portrait of Ludovic Halévy. About 1895-1896. Photograph. Original silver gelatine print. 82 x 74 mm. Of great rarity. Only one other known print (Los Angeles, The Jean-Paul Getty Museum, inv. 86.XM.690.3). The J. P. Getty Museum copy, which is a few millimetres wider on the left (81 x 78 mm), shows the beginning of a pedestal table. It appears, however, to be cropped on the right side compared to our photograph (the vase is less visible) and slightly shorter in height. Another variant of this portrait exists (ref : Malcolm Daniel no. 14) : it is framed slightly to the right, and Halévy looks away from the lens. A copy of this variant was sold at Christie's on 6 October 1998 (lot no. 81) ; a second one is in the Clark Institute of Art (inv. 1998.43). Provenance : A.B.M. At the beginning of the 1890s, Degas gradually gave in to his passion for the darkroom. In particular, he photographed members of the Halévy family in a dozen intimate shots : "Around 1890, when he photographed Ludovic and Louis Halévy, he uses to dine at their home twice or three times a week - Degas was happiest when his models were comfortably inert, immobilised, not by the vice of the old-fashioned daguerreotype, but by the amply upholstered cushions of the armchair, or when they had "dozed off" during the "terrible quarter of an hour" of posing they had to endure. ...] [Degas] photographed no one he did not know very well, though this may be an erroneous assertion, based on the only photographs that have survived today. "A close friend of Degas, whose passion for opera he shared, the writer and librettist Ludovic Halévy (1834-1908), co-author of the libretto of George Bizet's Carmen (1875), also appears in several of the artist's prints and drawings devoted to opera and ballet (including an important 1879 pastel in the Musée d'Orsay). ------------------------ All items are sent by DHL well packed Taxes and customs fees are payable by the buyers.

Creator:

Edgar Degas (1834-1917, French)

Creation Year:

1895

Dimensions:

Height: 3.23 in (8.2 cm)Width: 2.92 in (7.4 cm)

Medium:

Silver Gelatin

Period:

1890-1899

Condition:

Gallery Location:

PARIS, FR

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU2507212156012

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Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas, born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas in Paris in 1834, was the oldest of five children of Célestine Musson De Gas, a Creole from New Orleans, and Augustin De Gas, a banker. Degas began his schooling at age eleven, enrolling in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, but after his mother died when he was thirteen, his father and grandfather became the main influences on him for the remainder of his youth.

Upon graduating the Lycée in 1853, at age 18, he registered as a copyist in the Louvre Museum, but his father expected him to go to law school. Degas duly enrolled at the faculty of law of the University of Paris, in November 1853, but applied little effort to his studies. In 1855, Degas met Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose advice he never forgot: “Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist.” In April of that year, Degas was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts.

Evidence of Degas’ classical education can be seen in his early painting, Young Spartans Exercising (ca. 1860; National Gallery, London), done while he was still in his twenties. After 1865, when the Salon accepted his history painting The Misfortunes of the City of Orléans (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), Degas did not paint Academic subjects again, focusing his attention on scenes of modern life. He began to paint scenes of such urban leisure activities as horse racing and, after about 1870, of café-concert singers and ballet dancers. Degas' interest in ballet dancers intensified in the 1870s, and eventually he produced approximately 1,500 works on the subject. These are not traditional portraits, but studies that address the movement of the human body, exploring the physicality and discipline of the dancers through the use of contorted postures and unexpected vantage points.

Following the opening of trade with Japan in 1854, many French artists, including Degas, were increasingly influenced by Japanese prints. Degas abstracted from these prints their inventive compositions and points of view, particularly in his use of cropping and asymmetry [Dancers Practicing at the Bar (1877); Dancers, Pink and Green (ca. 1890)]. He also observed how sixteenth-century Italian Mannerists similarly framed their subjects, sometimes cutting off part of a figure.

Degas had an interest in a wide range of media, including engraving, monotype, and photography. Before 1880, he generally used oils for his completed works, but after 1875, he began using pastels more frequently, even in finished works such as Portraits at the Stock Exchange (1876). He submitted a suite of nudes, all rendered in pastel, to the final Impressionist exhibition in 1886; among these was Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub (1885). The figures in these pastels were criticized for their ungainly poses.

By the late 1880s, Degas’s eyesight had begun to fail, perhaps as a result of an injury suffered during his service in defending Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. After that time he focused almost exclusively on dancers and nudes, increasingly turning to sculpture. Degas continued working as late as 1912, when he was forced to leave the studio in Montmartre in which he had labored for more than twenty years. He died five years later in 1917, at the age of eighty-three.

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(Biography provided by Stern Pissarro Gallery)