Carefully reproduced from a rare 1923 limited edition, most of these magnificent drawings are unavailable elsewhere in published form. Dancers, nudes, portraits, travel scenes, and more. 100 drawings, including 8 in full color.
Forty-one full-page, six half-page drawings depict dancers on stage, in the classroom, and at rehearsals. Charming, spirited views of dancers pirouetting, executing grand battements and ports de bras, practicing at the barre, and more.
Through Edgar Degas’s beloved paintings, drawings, and sculptures, Susan Goldman Rubin conveys the wonder and excitement of the ballet world. Degas is one of the most celebrated painters of the impressionist movement, and his ballerina paintings are among the most favorite of his fans. In his artwork, Degas captures every moment, from the relentless hours of practice to the glamour of appearing on stage, revealing a dancer’s journey from novice to prima ballerina. Observing young students, Degas drew their poses again and again, determined to achieve perfection. The book includes a brief biography of his entire life, endnotes, bibliography, where to see his paintings, and an index.
Reproduces all of the significant pages from Degas's 1877 sketchbook, placing Degas both within the context of the cultivated salon of the Halévy family and the larger world of late 19th-century Paris.
Like the Impressionists, Degas sought to capture fleeting moments in the flow of modern life, yet he showed little interest in painting plain air landscapes, favoring scenes in theaters and cafes illuminated by artificial light, which he used to clarify the contours of his figures, adhering to his Academic training. He is especially identified with the subject of dance; more than half of his works depict dancers. He also was a superb draftsman, and particularly masterful in depicting movement, as can be seen in his interpretations of dancers and female nudes. His portraits are notable for their psychological complexity and for their portrayal of human isolation.
A heartrending, gripping novel about two sisters in Belle Époque Paris and the young woman forever immortalized as muse for Edgar Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. 1878 Paris. Following their father’s sudden death, the van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without his wages, and with the small amount their laundress mother earns disappearing into the absinthe bottle, eviction from their lodgings seems imminent. With few options for work, Marie is dispatched to the Paris Opéra, where for a scant seventeen francs a week, she will be trained to enter the famous ballet. Her older sister, Antoinette, finds work as an extra in a stage adaptation of Émile Zola’s naturalist masterpiece L’Assommoir. Marie throws herself into dance and is soon modeling in the studio of Edgar Degas, where her image will forever be immortalized as Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. There she meets a wealthy male patron of the ballet, but might the assistance he offers come with strings attached? Meanwhile Antoinette, derailed by her love for the dangerous Émile Abadie, must choose between honest labor and the more profitable avenues open to a young woman of the Parisian demimonde. Set at a moment of profound artistic, cultural, and societal change, The Painted Girls is a tale of two remarkable sisters rendered uniquely vulnerable to the darker impulses of “civilized society.” In the end, each will come to realize that her salvation, if not survival, lies with the other.
Rarely seen drawings and watercolors by some of the most influential French artists of the nineteenth century are the subject of this richly illustrated publication from The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum. From revealing preparatory sketches to exquisite finished watercolors, more than 100 works by artists such as Eugene Delacroix, Honore Daumier, Paul Cezanne, and Edgar Degas illuminate the range of French art over the course of a century of innovation. The BMA and the Walters have combined holdings of more than 900 French drawings from the nineteenth century, one of the nation's strongest and richest collections of French art from this period. The publication also includes works from the Peabody Institute Art Collection of the Maryland State Archives. The Essence of Line offers the first comprehensive discussion of the formation of these collections and their significance for the history of French art. The catalogue includes essays by Jay McKean Fisher, William R. Johnston, and Cheryl K. Snay that provide insights into the artistic, commercial, and social functions that drawings served for their creators and collectors, as well as how collecting patterns influenced the development of modernism. Conservator Kimberly Schenck bridges the worlds of the collector and of the artist by examining the production and the use of drawing materials in an epoch of radical changes in technique as well as style. Published on the occasion of an exhibition jointly organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum, this book presents a panorama of sketches, watercolors, and presentation drawings, many of them little known outside a small circle of experts. It is correlated with an online database of more than 900 nineteenth-century French drawings in the holdings of these Baltimore museums.
A lavish new investigation into the Paris Opera’s influence on Edgar Degas's painting. From his debut in the 1860s up to his final works after 1900, the Paris Opera formed a focal point of Edgar Degas's paintings. He explored the theater's various spaces—auditorium and stage, private boxes, foyers, and dance studios—and painted those who frequented them: dancers, singers, orchestral musicians, audience members, and subscribers watching from the wings. This theater presented a microcosm of infinite possibilities, allowing him to experiment with multiple points of view, contrasting lighting, motion, and the precision of movement. This catalog, created in concert with an exhibition at the Muse´e d'Orsay in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, considers the Paris Opera’s influence on Degas as a whole, examining not only his passionate relationship with the house and his musical tastes, but also the infinite resources of the opera's marvelous toolbox. Filled with striking reproductions of Degas’s work and including insightful essays by leading curators and scholars, Degas at the Opera offers admission into the world of Degas and the Paris Opera of the nineteenth century.