I. 

THE SHOP-TALK OF EDGAR DEGAS 

 The shop-talk of the great practitioners of painting will always be of inestimable value to painters and students of painting. Unfortunately a disappointingly small amount of it has been recorded which can be confidently accepted as reflecting the working ideas of outstanding artists. We should therefore be especially grateful that the most eminent painter of the second half of the nineteenth century was endowed with a keen analytical intelligence which found its natural expression in succinct and penetrating criticism. Few artists have been able to speak of their craft with more authority than Degas. His command of the various elements which go into the making of pictures has rarely been surpassed. He was a profound and reverent student of the old masters as well as one of the most daring and original artists in a period of artistic revolution. His severe professional training enabled him to judge the art of his time in a broader perspective than most of his colleagues were capable of doing. And his reputation for wit brought him attentive listeners eager to repeat whatever they heard from the master's lips. So a large number of his sayings have been transmitted and we may confidently expect that his already frequently quoted wisdom will continue to claim the attention of painters for many years to come. Because of Degas' unique position in the history of painting, these fragments of his professional thinking deserve the closest scrutiny.

 Reference numbers throughout text refer to SOURCES on pages 48 and 49, 

  Inevitably the correct interpretation of such obiter dicta will become increasingly elusive as the controversies which engendered them are forgotten. Only a small number of artists now living were practicing painters when the technical questions which preoccupied Degas were still quite universally recognized as vital to the art of painting. Degas had triumphantly solved problems for which many of his contemporaries were seeking solutions and the vocabulary and studio phraseology used by painters at that time carried connotations understood by all artists who had undergone the training considered indispensable in those days. But the situation changed rapidly after the first world war and by the nineteen-thirties the younger painters who believed they were pursuing pictorial objectives similar to those discussed in the nineteenth century were doing so with a technical equipment and a mental attitude so different from that of their predecessors that they readily misinterpreted the earlier jargon into terms of their own quite unrelated working experience, Eyen more misleading are the applications given to Degas' remarks by art writers who have used them to back up esthetic theories which would have been treated as arrant nonsense by the artist himself. Further confusion has been created for English readers by translations which, while not actually incorrect, often miss the strictly professional intention inherent in the painter's phrases. It is to be feared that much of the profound understanding of painting which underlies these aphorisms may elude future generations.

To evaluate a painter's criticism correctly it is important to take his character and general intellectual outlook into consideration as well as his pictures. Here we are fortunate. Degas consorted with highly intelligent men, some of whom recorded and published their impressions. Painter-writers like William Rothenstein, Walter Sickert, and jacques-Emile Blanche have penned revealing pages about the older colleague whom they frequented and admired. Three minor painters with whom he was on familiar terms, Georges jeanniot, 25 Maurice Gueroult, 1* and Ernest Rouart, 19 have also passed on extremely valuable data. George Moore's well-known essay 11 was written with the help of Jacques-Emile Blanche. Of another sort, and covering a later phase of Degas' career, is the picture of the artist's declining years given us by Paul Valery. 19 The poet philosopher's penetrating intelligence and lucid style lend weight to his report. We feel that this estimate of the aging painter's character must be authoritative: 

* Henri Hertz cites this painter as a source of information in his "Degas."

    Valery's commentary, however, reveals the age-old incomprehension which separates painters from men of letters in matters pertaining to art. Whenever the two types have confronted each other they have reacted in about the same way. The painter is aware that he is discussing entities perceptible to himself by reason of an innate aptitude sharpened by a highly specialized discipline. He has learned from experience that these entities, which are the very essence of painting, are imperceptible, and therefore incomprehensible, to persons lacking this aptitude and this training. This does not mean that such persons are necessarily insensible to the message of a completed work of art. It does mean, however, that they are incapable of following the reasoning which went into the construction of that work or of making an analysis leading to a just evaluation of its components, both matters of fundamental importance to the painter. The inability of the nonpainter to do these things in relation to painting in no way predicates a lack of ability to reason or to analyze. Indeed, in the present instance the presumption favors Valery's superiority to Degas in these respects. But the nonpainter bases his premises on assumptions that he obviously cannot verify through his senses and a reasoning starting from such shaky premises is liable to lead anywhere. For instance, we find writers, in many respects highly intelligent, who are convinced that they perceive fundamental similarities and nearly equal merits in the drawings of Picasso and those of Ingres, or in the early drawings of Matisse and the early drawings of Degas. The blindness to the meaning of line implicit in such judgments is immediately apparent to anyone who has acquired even a fair command of the art of drawing. To him any esthetic philosophy based on the assumption that such patently different things are cognate must be valueless. And the intellectual nonpainter understandably resents this low estimate of his reasoning. In the case of Degas and Valery the importance and the quality of the two interlocutors lends special interest to the writer's reaction to the parallelism of their thinking.

  Degas, Valery observes, set great store by the jargon of painting. And he adds that Degas clung to this special language because he had a taste for the abstruse. "He saw in painting a highly specialized discipline, certain mysteries and esoteric technicalities, and he did not dislike leaving outsiders, especially a prying man of letters, bewildered by a vocabulary whose only key lay in professional practice, in its requirements, and in the ideas engendered thereby:" 19 In just such a guise do painters often appear to friends who

get them talking about their art. And the mutual exasperation that regularly results is also expressed by Valery. "Degas," he observes, "liked to talk about painting and could not abide hearing others talk about it." 19 To someone else Degas had said: "Men of letters explain the arts without understanding them." 12 And many artists have felt that the gist of the matter has never been more aptly phrased.

 Painters, however, understood Degas' language and valued what he had to say. Blanche, who had consorted with many of the leading artists and men of letters of his time, asserted he had met with few minds more open than his. "Degas, despite his prejudices, has looked at everything with such interest that he has no antipathies." 20 Walter Sickert wrote: "Degas was impelled during the whole of his life, by his white-hot intellectual passion for rectitude, to give his wisdom the briefest and most portable form conceivable in mordant epigram." 17 Sickert reports that Fantin-Latour said to him of Degas, "C'est un personnage trop enseignant." (Too didactic a person.) "Thus noting," adds Sickert, "a defect which was to me precisely the quality." 17 "A terrible man, but frank and loyal," 9was the opinion of Pissarro. 

These comments made by his friends should serve as an introduction to the following collection of quotations made up of chance remarks, witticisms, and carefully considered statements which were in many cases recorded without the context in which they were made. I have included only quotations pertaining to painting. Most of them were published in the original French and I have endeavored to find an English equivalent that would be understandable to painters. Degas himself continually stressed the fact that it was only to painters that he could express himself about painting. A few epigrams I have deemed untranslatable and have left them in his own language, but these few are more striking for their wit than for their wisdom.  

II.  

is said to have worked but a few months under the direction of Barrias, who was his senior by only twelve years. However, the first systematic instruction received by a young painter is apt to leave an imprint on his later development so this early contact with academic discipline at an impressionable age may conceivably have been not without influence. Degas does not appear to have referred to this incident of his career during the latter part of his life.  

    We cannot hope to understand the ideas of Degas about painting unless we have a clear picture of what painting meant to Degas. Today he is universally accepted as a very great artist but, through one of the vagaries of artistic snobbery, most people associate him exclusively with the Impressionist * group, with whom he frequently consorted and occasionally exhibited. In point of fact he differed from these painters in almost every important respect; in his culture, in his professional training, in his aims, and in his working methods. Perhaps more than any thing else the thoroughness of his early studies

differentiated him from his Impressionist friends. The details of Degas' apprenticeship have been dealt with cursorily by some of his biographers while others have even gone so far as to assert that the influences he had come under in his youth were actually detrimental to his development as an artist. A brief survey of his student years is therefore necessary before we examine his professional opinions.

  In 1853 the nineteen-year-old Degas worked in the atelier of Felix Barrias (1822-1907), 7 a now forgotten painter of the academic sort whose extremely competent "Exiles of Tiberius" had made a sensation in the Salon two years earlier. We are told that the boy worked in this artist's atelier in the morning and copied in the Louvre in the afternoon. Study of the old masters therefore played an important part in his earliest training. He is said to have worked but a few months under the direction of Barrias, who was his senior by only twelve years. However, the first systematic instruction received by a younger painter is apt to leave an imprint on his later development so this early contact with academic discipline at an impressionable age may conceivably have been not without influence. Degas dose not appear to have referred to this incident of his career during the latter part of his life.

  It is very generally known that Degas was a pupil of Louis Lamothe, to whom he went after leaving Barrias. But Lamothe is remembered today only as the teacher of Degas. Actually, he was a good deal besides. Lamothe, a shy and retiring semi-invalid, came to Paris from Lyon with the Flandrin brothers. Hippolyte Flandrin (1809-1864) was the most important of Ingres' pupils, if we except Chasseriau whose divided allegiance set him somewhat apart from the others. Flandrin was a correct and learned draftsman and an austere stylist whose decorations in the Church of St. Germain des Pres are among the best mural paintings produced in the nineteenth century. From him, as well as from Ingres himself, Lamothe acquired his knowledge of painting. We have an estimate of the latter written by one of his own pupils, Henri Lerolle, a painter respected in his day. Lerolle wrote of Lamothe: "He drew in a noble and incisive manner which he learned from his master [in this context, Ingres] which was far superior to the soft and sandpapered drawing of Flandrin. But his timid nature and his poverty kept him from getting ahead as he should have. . . so his entire life was spent in the shadow of Flandrin, to whom he was vastly superior. True enough, Ingres said to him from time to time, by way of encouragement, 'When I die you will take my place.' But Ingres lived a long time." 7 Decorations by Lamothe are to be seen in the Church of Ste. Clothilde in Paris and in a Jesuit Chapel in the same city. He died in 1869. 

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When written with a capital I the word Impressionist is now ordinarily used in referring to the group who exhibited under the leadership of Claude Monet. Degas, of course, was also an impressionist in the larger sense of the term which includes all painters primarily concerned with recording their visual impressions in paint. 

 It is clear that the now forgotten Lamothe was a very competent painter indeed who had assimilated the vast store of knowledge available in the entourage of Ingres. Quite

possibly, too, this ailing, disappointed little man devoted more time and care to his pupils than the illustrious Ingres was able to do. The view that Lamothe was an excellent teacher is substantiated by the careers of two other pupils, Elie Delaunay and Henri Regnault. Delaunay became one of the most accomplished painters of the nineteenth century while the brilliant career of Regnault, cut short by his heroic death at twenty-eight, is one of the tragedies of art history. We are told that Degas continued to seek counsel from Lamothe until he was past thirty. 1  

 Degas entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1855, where Delaunay had preceded him. Other fellow students there at the time were Legros, Ricard, Fantin-Latour, and Bonnat. He does not appear to have remained long at the Beaux-Arts) but when Degas visited Rome a little later he found his old comrades, Delaunay and Bonnat, working at the Villa Medici. Contacts with such exceptionally brilliant young painters at this stage of his career certainly contributed a great deal to his artistic development. Degas and Bonnat were close friends at this time, the two men being united by a common devotion to the great Italian masters. 14  

 So the once-current legend that Degas received but little teaching, and that from an inferior painter, misrepresents the facts. The record shows that he had access to the best teaching available in an era when the craft of painting had reached one of its high points. The strongest influence under which he came, through Lamothe, was a distillation of the knowledge transmitted by the greatest painter then alive, Ingres. And what a young painter learned from his fellow students should never be underestimated when his training is being examined. Bonnat, Delaunay, Fantin-Latour, and Legros represented important trends of the immediate future. To them may be added another friend of these student days, Gustave Moreau, an inferior technician but a remarkable intellect. Degas knew what was being taught and what was being thought in the ateliers during the eighteen-fifties. 

 The significance of another fact is also generally overlooked. Until well into middle life Degas enjoyed the conversation of "academic" painters whose professional accomplishments are nowadays ignored or held up as objects of ridicule. In the eighteen-sixties, when Degas frequented the Cafe Guerbois and, later, the Nouvelle Athenes and discussed art with painters of the "advance-guard," he was also taking his meals regularly at the Cafe de la Rochefoucauld with such men as Gerome, Cormon, and Humbert. 28 His relations with Gerome remained extremely cordial throughout the lifetime of the older man. 25 He was wont to dine with Meissonier and Puvis de Chavannes at various houses. With Alfred Stevens he was closely associated all his life. 

 These things had a marked influence on the art of Degas. The severe discipline of his early studies, intelligently academic they might now be called, especially his intensive pursuit of drawing, laid the foundation of this art, a foundation sufficiently solid to support his later revolutionary experiments and even to partially compensate for the failing eyesight of his declining years. Subsequently Degas' continued contacts with painters of wide culture and great professional skill kept his mind open to points of view

wholly outside the ken of the other artists associated with the Impressionists, a qualified exception being made for Manet. The superiority and enduring interest of the art of Degas, which are becoming increasingly apparent as the years go by, are in a great measure due to the thoroughness of his training and to the breadth of his artistic culture and understanding. 

 Because of his background and experience Degas' ideas about the kind of training which should be given to prospective painters deserve separate consideration. despite the fact that he never did any systematic teaching. They must be taken as the suggestions of an observer who knew a great deal about the art of painting but who never concerned himself with their practical application to the curriculum of an art student. Above all it is important to bear in mind that they were obviously presented as correctives intended to supplement the best nineteenth century teaching, not as substitutes for it. 

 Degas was already a mature painter when the Ecole des Beaux Arts was reorganized into an official institution in 1863 and established along lines which were to be later followed by our twentieth-century art schools. He could not say enough against it. The mere mention of the Beaux-Arts was enough to set him in a rage.19 He proclaimed that it should be abolished.24 He knew that fine painters were not developed by an institutional system of this kind and the later history of art schools everywhere has proved him right. But it was the system he attacked, not the knowledge and painting ability of such men as Gerome and Bonnat, who taught there in the latter part of the century. He criticized the esthetics and occasionally the execution of these and of other official painters, as we shall presently see, but his strictures cannot justifiably be interpreted as a condemnation of the entire academic equipment, as some have held it to be.

 Whenever he got to talking about the training advisable for a prospective painter Degas seems to have emphasized two things: an intensive study of the great masters and a development of the visual memory, both of which were usually ignored in the art teaching of the later nineteenth century.

 Berthe Morisot recorded that Degas had said "that the study of nature was of little significance, painting being a conventional art, and that it was infinitely more worth while to learn to draw after Holbein."19

 "The secret lies in following the counsels which the masters give us through their pictures while we do something different from what they did." He said this to Georges Jeanniot. 25

 "The museums are there to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation." 24

 "The [Florentine] painters of the fifteenth century are the true, the only guides. If you are thoroughly imbued with them and if you ceaselessly perfect your means of  expression by the study of nature you are bound to achieve something." 7

 "It is all very well to copy what you see; it is much better to draw what you only see in memory. There is a transformation during which the imagination works in conjunction with the memory. You only put down what made an impression on you, that is to say the essential. Then your memory and your invention are freed from the dominating influence of nature. That is why pictures made by a man with a trained memory who knows thoroughly both the masters and his own craft are almost always remarkable works; for instance Delacroix." 25

 Jacques-Emile Blanche tells us of his own bewilderment as a student to whom Degas used to say, "You must not paint from nature," 20

 In his early notebooks Degas jotted down a fanciful description of how he might conduct an art class if he ever were in charge of one.

 "Equip the studio with benches arranged in tiers to inculcate the habit of drawing objects seen from above and from below. Allow students to paint only images reflected in mirrors to instill a detestation of the trompe l'oeil. For portrait-studies, pose the sitter on the ground floor while the students work upstairs, so as to train them to remember shapes and never to paint directly." 7

 Years later he told Maurice Gueroult: "If I were to open an academy I would have a five-story building. The model would pose on the ground floor with the first-year students. The most advanced students would work on the fifth floor." 1 Several other versions of this idea exist which suggest that Degas rcpeated it frequently. He considered it important, evidently.

 Now the line of thought indicated by these excerpts is of very great interest, but before seeking its practical application one should first examine Degas' record as an adviser of young painters and then decide how much support these ideas derive from what we know about his own work done as a student and about his later practice.

 Degas did no systematic teaching himself. It is generally understood that the amateur painter Ernest Rouart was the only student who ever painted under his supervision. 7 Rouart's report evokes the picture of an artist whose restlessly inquiring intelligence impelled him to use his disciple as a means of trying out new theories and working methods.19 Of the others who are known to have received his advice, Maurice Gueroult and Georges Jeanniot* left no available pictures from which we can judge of its effect. Jacques-Emile Blanche was not influenced by Degas in his way of working. "Educated as we were," he flatly states, "Monsieur Degas' edicts had no possible application. "20 Walter Sicken, on the other hand, did apply Degas' principles in his paintings, as his pictures reveal, with results that will certainly not be universally

considered successful. It is extremely regrettable that very little light has been thrown on the master-disciple relationship between Degas and Mary Cassatt, for this admirable painter was deeply influenced by the French master and her highly individual art reflects many of his principles. Miss Cassatt is not believed to have had any direct criticisms from Degas, however. 7 So, on the whole, we are forced to conclude that Degas was temperamentally unsuited to guide a talented beginner through the various stages of his artistic development. He lacked the ability to evaluate the capacity of a student at a given stage and then to point out the particular corrective capable of straightening him out at that time, which is one of the most necessary qualifications of a teacher of painting. Nor does he seem to have considered the idiosyncrasies and special gifts of the young painter to whom he happened to be talking and to have adjusted his advice to suit the individual case. He could put his finger unerringly on the flaw in a picture presented for his criticism but he was apparently unable to indicate the specific steps that might help his disciple to become a more competent painter in the future.

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 *Pierre-Georges Jeanniot, born in Geneva of French parents. Exhibited first at the Salon of 1872. illustrated several books. Judging from these illustrations and one or two reproductions of his paintings, he was a mediocre designer and a not very competent draftsman, his feeling for proportions being notably

weak. The illustrations reveal a marked gift for noting expressive gesture. 

 Moreover we are able to offset Degas' provocative but somewhat visionary recommendations by examining his own early studies, for probably no painter of the first rank has left as many examples of his student work. When the contents of his studio were sold after his death, illustrated catalogues were put on sale. These contain reproductions of drawings, paintings, and copies made as early as 1856. Other studies of this period are reproduced in the definitive work on Degas by P. A. Lemoisne.7 The meticulous studies made from life in Rome and Florence when the painter was twenty-three or so demonstrate the skill he had already acquired and the care with which he was then drawing from nature. However much he belittled this kind of study thirty years later, these drawings, the existence of which he had perhaps forgotten, provide sufficient evidence of how he had laid the basis of his ability to draw.

 When we look into Degas' later practice we come upon a certain amount of information about his methods in spite of the secretiveness of his ways. Most of this information dates from the nineties, when the painter was about sixty years old. Rothenstein, a very reliable reporter in these matters, tells us "he was then making studies of laundresses ironing and of women at their toilets. Some of these were redrawn again and again on tracing paper pinned over drawings already made; this practice made for correction and simplification and was common with artists in France. Degas rarely painted from nature." 22 It was his custom to gather ideas for gestures and compositions as he watched the daily life about him, registering observations in his amazingly retentive memory and making rapid pencil notations as well. 30 He then hired models to repeat the required gestures in his studio while he made innumerable drawings of them. An article by one of these models. which

bears an unmistakable stamp of authenticity, was published in a French periodical in 1919, 5

 Unfortunately the sittings there described took place in 1910, when the painter was seventy-six. Because of his failing eyesight he had given up drawing and was modeling a figurine. The author-model tells of the demands Degas made on her strength, of the necessity of holding the pose very correctly, and of the old man's irascibility at any letting-up in that respect. She speaks of measurements with calipers and of recourse to plumb line, all after the manner of other artists. She also recalled having posed for Degas seven years earlier, when he was still drawing, but dose not specify that his working methods had been different at that time. Referring to those earlier sittings, when she still a very young girl, Degas reminded her of how badly she had then posed. Clearly Degas' independence of the model was something very relative indeed when it came to establishing shapes. We shall have occasion to examine his approach to color in another section.

 As a matter of fact the pictures themselves reveal the most assiduous study from the living model. Indeed, the history of painting does not provide an example of an art more firmly based on the study and observation of nature. Even if the early drawings were not there to attest to the close rendering by which Degas learned to observe, the pictures of all periods are obviously constructed on the most precise notations of form, value, and gesture. It is just this fidelity to natural appearances which has endowed the art of Degas with its extraordinary vitality and unfailing interest, a fidelity, enhanced by superb artistry of presentation. The artistry derives in great part from study of the masters, but it would have become tiresomely derivative had it not been fortified by much direct rendering from nature. Evidently Degas chose to minimize the work he did "from the model" and one suspects he would have liked to conceal it entirely. But no competent painter having access to the pictures would be deceived in this respect.

 Degas' ideas regarding the painter's training unquestionably reflect the principles of Lecoq de Boisbaudran (1805-1902). I have not read that the two men ever met but several pupils of this very remarkable teacher were friends of Degas, notably Fantin-Latour, Tissot, and Legros. The friendships with Fantin and Legros date from Degas' brief stay at the Beaux-Arts and the two young men could hardly have failed to tell Degas about the course in memory training which was Lecoq's great contribution to nineteenth-century art teaching. Probably Degas adapted their ideas to his own needs at about that time. At any rate he applied them with even better results than any of the master's direct pupils and no doubt he felt that this memory training had been the most valuable part of his professional education. In his later talk he ignored the essential fact that Lecoq insisted that drawing from the model should be the main discipline of the student, while the ability to draw and paint from memory was being developed as a separate, but vitally important, activity. 26 Perhaps Degas intended merely to emphasize what the younger painters were neglecting and took their work from the model for granted.

 But the painter who had the greatest influence on the art of Degas was, of course, Ingres. Degas' only personal contacts with the great man were in his boyhood. On one of these

occasions he had told Ingres of his desire to become an artist and had shown him some drawings. Degas' accounts of this episode, for he gave several, are of exceptional interest.

 Degas told the story twice to Paul Valery, 19 who was struck by the difference between the two versions. In the first version Ingres said to his young interlocutor: "Draw lines, lots of lines, either from memory or from nature." But when Degas related his adventure some time later he quoted the master's words as: "Young man, never draw from nature, always from memory and from engravings after the masters." This is strikingly different. What are we to deduce from the change? Can it be that Degas' increasing dislike for the prevailing teaching exclusively based on rendering from the model caused him to emend, perhaps unconsciously, the words of Ingres in order to make his point?

 The suspicion is strengthened by the reports of this meeting transmitted to us by three painters, each of whom had it from Degas himself, William Rothenstein, 22 Walter Sickert, 16 and Maurice Gueroult.l In each case Ingres is reported to have urged the boy to draw lines, a great many lines. Not one of the painters mentions a warning against drawing directly from nature. Now to any painter such a warning emanating from such a source would have been startling and unforgettable. We can safely assume that Degas never passed on this sensational item to these three disciples and some will infer that Ingres never said the words attributed to him in the second story repeated by Paul Valery.

 Occasional distortions of this kind would inevitably occur from time to time in the talk of a man of Degas' make-up. An individualistic thinker such as he, given to combating currently accepted ideas, would be inclined to stress, sometimes to overstress, the points on which he differed most from the currently accepted attitudes. It could not have occurred to him that his spontaneous remarks would be recorded, collated, and interpreted many years later. It behooves the student to ferret out the coherent point of view behind these fragmentary memories and snatches of conversations.

 'What conclusions should be drawn from his arbitrary and seemingly unworkable suggestions regarding the painter's training? Mainly, it seems to me, that the two things which he emphasized, intensive study of the masters and systematic development of the visual memory, were being neglected and that Degas believed both to be of paramount importance to the potential painter. He does not appear to have seriously considered how these two things should be integrated with other equally necessary, and perhaps even more basic, studies. This remains to be thought through by future teachers of painting but Degas' suggestions may well prove to be of incalculable value. 

 III.  

 The art of Degas is essentially intellectual. True, literary connotations, symbolism, philosophical undertones, and story telling, all the attributes of what is popularly called intellectual painting, are absent from it. But this art is intellectual in the painter's sense of

the word, in that it is the result of carefully reasoned procedures in which the emotions of the artist played almost no part and his intuitions were constantly subjected to his analytical thinking. Degas was well aware of this. "No art," he said, "was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament - temperament is the word - I know nothing. When people talk about temperament it always seems to me like the strong man in the fair who straddles his legs and asks someone to step up on the palm of his hand," 11 

 This is apparent in his pictures. To many of us it is the chief source of their abiding fascination. There is scarcely a sketch or a study by Degas that does not enlist our interest by virtue of the intelligence displayed in attacking the problem in hand. Of Degas it could properly be said that, unlike Homer, he never nodded.  

 His conversation, then, due allowance being made for the varying circumstances which elicited his remarks, reflected a carefully pondered artistic philosophy, the result of thought, observation, and experiment. Degas, as a painter, knew just what he was doing, knew why he was doing it, and knew what he was saying when he talked about painting. Of course, as Walter Sickert pointed out, each remark conveys only what he said at a given date to a given person. 10 Nor should we forget Valery's words about "Degas' intransigeant explosions, implacable epigrams. . . his ever ready venom, terrible moodiness, and temper." 19 The tendentious character of the epigrams cannot be discounted. But when a particular idea reappears in varying forms in his conversations with different persons we may assume that it embodies a guiding principle of the thinking which Degas applied to making pictures. This conclusion seems to me inescapable. We should question our ability to grasp his precise meaning or its application. But we cannot in all reasonableness uphold that this painter did not know what he was talking about.  

 The most striking of the ideas which recur again and again in reports of Degas' conversation are closely related to those discussed in connection with the painter's training. Just as Degas deplored the too-exclusive "painting from the model" to which students were subjected in his day, so did he deride the subservience to the immediate "look of nature" which was the very foundation of the art of his outstanding contemporanes. 

 "Art is deceit. An artist is only an artist at certain hours through an effort of the will; objects possess the same appearance for everyone; the study of nature is a convention. Isn't Manet the proof? For although he boasted of seriously copying nature he was the worst painter in the World, never making a brush-stroke without having the masters in mind." 19  

 "A painting is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth." 7  

 "One conveys the sensation of truth by means of the false." 16

       (Original given in French.) 

 "Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it." 24 

 "He who says art says artifice." 24  

 "Art is dishonest and crue1." 24 

 "Art cannot be made with an intent to please." 24  

 "Art is an artifice. It is made up of sacrifices." 7 

 "Aren't all beautiful things made up of sacrifices?" 19  

 "Just now fashion favors paintings by which you can tell the time of day as by a sundial. I don't like that at all. A painting requires a certain mystery, something undefined, a touch of fancy. When you continually dot all the eyes you end up being a bore. Even working from nature you have to compose. There are people who consider that forbidden. Speaking of that, Monet said to me, 'When Jongkind needed a house or a tree he turned around and took them from behind his back, Well, yes, why not? Corot, too, must have composed from nature. His charm comes above all from that. A picture is an original combination of lines and tones that set each other off," 25  

 "A picture must only be made from a study painted from nature. It is composed beforehand in your mind. The studies you have amassed are useful simply as supports, as valuable bits of information," 25  

 Discussing a canvas of Georges Jeanniot's with the painter, Degas said: "Your picture has not enough unity and that is inevitable because you did not paint it in your studio. And that was your mistake. You have tried to render the air of outdoors, the air we breathe, the Plein air. Well, a picture is primarily a work of the imagination of the artist. It must never be a copy. If later you can add a few touches of nature, obviously that does no harm. The air you see in pictures by the masters is not breathable." 25  

 This dislike of atmospheric effect in pictures is something we shall encounter again in his talk. It is a bias which Degas shares with some other masters of form expressed by linear contours rather than by light and shade or by gradations of color. It is thoroughly justifiable as a personal preference, as a basis for a particular type of art. but to accept the principle as absolute would rule out the masterpieces of Rembrandt, Velasquez, and Vermeer.  

 "Nothing in art must appear accidental, even the action [depicted] ." 7  

 "Art is the same word as artifice, that is to say a deceptive thing. It must manage to give the look of nature by deceitful methods. But the result must appear true. You may draw a straight line crooked but it has got to give the impression of being straight." 1  

 "The main thing is to grasp and to render the general tone which establishes the harmony of a picture. In order to make that tone more striking and more true you may, if need be, introduce untrue colors which will set it off." 1  

 Were these statements, made as they were to different individuals over a considerable number of years, intended to counteract the then widely held belief that rendering visual truth was the supreme goal of painting? Do they reflect Degas' predilection for Holbein and the Quattrocentists at a time when his colleagues based their art on that of Velasquez or of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters? For my part I cannot in every case penetrate their meaning. But one thing is incontestable. Degas' own application of these principles was remarkably effective. Few painters have more successfully evoked the aspect of things seen indoors in shape, value, and tone. Some of the most lynx-eyed devotees of visual truth among the painters of his time were taken in by his artifice. The existence of the trickery would not even have been suspected had not the magician himself told us it was there. This very fact gives the measure of his achievement. But we may question whether a less completely equipped painter than Degas can safely attempt to follow the dark counsels he has left us in this respect.  

 When it came to landscape Degas was unequivocally opposed to painting on the spot. He was continually jibing at painters who did so. "If I were a landed proprietor," he said to Ricketts, "I would have keepers on my estate with orders to fire on any landscape painter they saw - with buckshot first as a hint." 16 Another friend quotes him as having said that he wished he were a despot so as to have all those who set up easels in the fields executed. 1 And he liked to say that he, himself, did not feel the need of "losing consciousness" 16 in front of nature, or before a pond, or before whatever variation suited the occasion and the conversation. The phrase "losing consciousness" points up the peculiar tendency to become absorbed in exact rendering at the expense of artistic selection which besets the painter working out of doors face to face with his subject. 

 Degas' views on landscape painting carry less weight than his opinions concerning some other branches of the art of painting. He undeniably devised extremely effective backgrounds for his race-track pictures out of landscape material. But his straight landscapes will not convince all painters of the validity of his approach. His way of making them was akin to that which Lecoq de Boisbaudran taught his pupils, from one of whom Degas probably learned it. We know that Whistler worked out his Nocturnes by some such method, thereby proving its practicability. 26 Degas almost certainly trained his memory by the Boisbaudran system. The results were in themselves phenomenal. Jeanniot relates that Degas and the sculptor Bartholome once arrived to spend a few days at his country nouse in the course of a trip which the two older artists were taking together. During the visit Degas reconstituted from memory a number of the landscapes which he had observed while traveling. Bartholome was amazed to see him draw the

scenes "as if they were before his eyes. 'And note,' he exclaimed, 'that he did not stop once to look at them.' "25  

 On the other hand few painters have spoken about drawing with more authority. As a draftsman Degas takes a place alongside of the very greatest; with Mantegna, Leonardo, Raphael, Holbein, Ingres, the great stylists who were also severe masters of form. His eminence in this field has been universally recognized by serious draftsmen. He was well aware of his own bias in that direction. "I always tried," he said, "to urge my colleagues to seek for new combinations along the path of draftsmanship, which I consider a more fruitful field than that of color. But they wouldn't listen to me and have gone the other way." 16 And to others he said: "I am a colorist with line." 1 (Je suis coloriste avec la ligne.) 15  

 His conception of the nature of drawing is implicit in a statement that occurs more than once in reported conversations.  

 "Drawing must not be confused with establishing shapes, two totally different things," At least this is the best translation I have been able to devise for an aphorism which deserves to be given in the original. "Il ne faut pas confondre le dessin avec la mise en place." 19 His meaning is clarified by another remark: "Drawing is not form but a way of seeing form." 19  

 "Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see," 7  

 "Drawing is not form, it is your understanding of form." 1 

 Which is to say that establishing shapes correctly is merely a necessary preliminary. In Degas' time the acquisition of this indispensable skill was taken for granted as the essential part of a painter's early training. But the art of drawing, he is telling us, consists of conveying to the beholder the significance which the shapes have for the artist. A "way of seeing form" is evidently one of the things which Degas discovered in his study of the early Italian masters and, following their lead, he developed his own way of seeing. When he had established his shapes he worked over them until he had given them the maximum significance. 

 "Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again." 20  

 "You must do over the same subject ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must appear accidental, even a movement." 7  

 "One thing is certain. Setting up on paper a thing from nature and drawing it are two enormously different things." 6  

 When a critic had said of him that he showed "constant uncertainty about his proportions" Degas immediately proclaimed that nothing could better describe his state of mind while working, 19 This should be heartening to inferior draftsmen who share this state of mind.  

 A revealing hint about his procedure occurs in one of his letters, "Although I repeat to myself every morning that one must draw from the base up towards the top, that one ascends the shape better than one goes down it, automatically I start with the head, alas!" 21 A number of us have shared this experience. There appear to be two advantages in drawing upwards when establishing the outline of a human figure on paper. The unnatural upward motion of the pencil counteracts the tendency to allow the point to slide indifferently over the forms and, second, this way of attacking the shape helps the draftsman to overcome the common tendency to overstate the size of the head in its relation to the figure seen as a whole. 

 As we can see, Degas was intensely interested in getting the expressive gesture for his subject. the appropriate movement or attitude. He carried this search further than has any other painter. Wehave seen that his custom was to have a hired model repeat a desired gesture again and again while he made outlines of the shapes thereby created. Jeanniot was present in the studio on one of these occasions and saw Degas trying to find "the gesture of a woman drying herself, leaning against the high back of an upholstered chair covered with a bathrobe," 25 Several studies exist which were probably made at this time and which reveal the intensity of the artist's search. But when he had finally gbt what he wanted he knew it. 

 "Once I have a line I hold on to it, I do not lose it again." (Translation,) 16  

 It is then that he traces his drawing again and again. The professional model already quoted tells us that, when she was posing for him in 1902, she saw Degas trace the same drawing onto several sheets of pastel paper. He would then color these tracings in different tints, experimenting with various tones until a combination pleased him sufficiently for him to finish it up. 5 Jeanniot found him one day working at such a pastel. "He had just reworked in an orange tonality a composition which I had seen three days earlier established in blue-greens. Over this study based on ohservation of the model he had hatched violet, mauve, and orange strokes which allowed the greens underneath to show through here and there." 25 The museums today provide abundant material for anyone wishing to study this procedure of his.

  During the early part of his career (1865-1880) Degas worked for the most part with oil pigments. In this medium he attained an astonishing mastery of which the "Madame Gaujelin" (1867) in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a fine example. Blanche, whose close association with Degas and his group enables him to speak with authority, tells us that he acquired his technical methods from Alfred Stevens. 20 He could not have gone to a finer adviser. It is therefore singular that he should have become dissatisfied

with these methods. The reason probably lies in an attitude towards his work which Ernest Rouart describes as follows:

  "Degas had great difficulty in reaching a result satisfactory to himself and rarely concluded that a painting had been carried to the point desired. In order to be satisfied he wanted a picture to be complete, not as to perfection of detail but in its unity of effect and in the coordination of its various components, that is to say in the proper relationship of lines. colors, and values. He attached the greatest importance to composition, to the main arabesque of the design, then to the rendering of form and modeling, to the accent of the drawing, as he called it. He never felt he had gone far enough in giving forms a vigorous expression." 19 Pastel proved to be a remarkably appropriate medium for these purposes.

  But Degas remained convinced that oil paint also held solution for his problems, could he but rediscover the techniques of the old masters. Those interested in his researches will find them described in an understanding and well-documented book by Denis Rouart, "Degas a la Recherche de Sa Technique." 27 Readers of this excellent study will be startled by the amateurish nature of Degas' investigation. He ignored all documentary evidence on the subject and read neither the older treatises on technique nor the reports of the then recent scientific experiments in the chemistry of painting. He based his conclusions entirely on his own observation of pictures by old masters. On the other hand he was fascinated, we are told, by the deleterious recipes and weird concoctions which form such an odd feature of Delacroix' Journal. 27 The sad alteration of Delacroix' colors, already noticeable in the lifetime of Degas, 29 should have been enough to invalidate these combinations of notoriously impermanent colors and chemically incompatible pigments.

  Stranger still is Ernest Rouart's narrative concerning the copy he made of a Mantegna in the Louvre under the supervision of Degas himself. Rouart was instructed to copy this tempera painting with oil paint, making first a monochrome underpainting in green. When Rouart had done this, using terre verte, which at least had the justification of tradition, Degas made him do it over again in an "apple-green" tonality. It would be superfluous to recount here the entire adventure which naturally ended in complete failure. 19 Such irrationality in a highly intelligent and very accomplished painter is hard to explain.

  When we turn to Degas' comments on painting we are struck by his recurrent praise of flatness. "It is flat like fine painting." 19 he would say of an, object, stroking and caressing it with his hand. "Nature is smooth," 16 he was fond of repeating, and he praised certain pictures by asserting that they were "painted like a door." 16 ,This preference for a smooth surface is, of course, a matter of personal taste though it rules out a considerable amount of very great painting, Rembrandt's for instance. However, most of the fine pictures made before the nineteenth century do have smooth surfaces. They are more easily kept clean, for one thing, dirt and varnish tending to accumulate in the rugosities of pigment. This homely but important truth may have been in Degas' mind.

  But he may have intended to mean more than mere flatness of surface for he also said, "Relief should be flat." (Le relief doit etre Plat.) 24 He probably meant that form should

be expressed without resorting to extreme high-lights to obtain an effect of relief. It was the practice of many of the greatest masters to avoid stressing these high-lights, thereby obtaining breadth of effect. Titian may in this respect be compared to Rubens, who utilized the glitter of high-lights whenever possible. We do not find them in the paintings of Degas. In the process of painting, "his practice was," Rothenstein tells us, "to keep the darks a little lighter, the lights a little darker, until the final painting." 22 This system, intelligently carried out, leads to unity and breadth.

  It is strange how little note has been taken of Degas as a colorist. Yet no other painter working in a tradition based on complete representation has evolved a greater variety of rare and fascinating color schemes. Veronese alone comes to mind as his equal in this respect. The other great colorists, such as Titian, Rubens, Velasquez, or Vermeer, each kept within a limited range established by the combination of tones to which he was partial, only occasionally introducing a new color note in an experimental sort of way. Veronese, keeping within his chosen silvery grey-green tonality, achieved ravishingly beautiful effects with brilliant colors that no one else has successfully combined, effects which have remained objects of wonder and despair to painters ever since. Compared to the complex orchestration of Veronese, Degas' color schemes suggest the sound effects attained by certain modern masters of chamber music who restrict themselves to small groups or carefully selected instruments. The Frenchman's harmonies are thinner, drier, verging at times on the acidulous. Richness he appears to avoid. But Degas' range and variety are even greater than Veronese's. He worked out combinations which would have been thought outlandish before him, but the results are invariably interesting and distinguished, even when not entirely pleasing to the average eye.

  Looking at one of his pictures jeanniot said to Degas that he must have had great fun searching for the color scheme he had obtained. "Yes," replied Degas, "I remembered a certain oriental rug I had seen in Place Clichy. You have got to make use of your memory. But, you know," he added, "that blue there, in reality, is a cold green." 25

  As taste in color is not communicable by precept we should not expect to find much definite guidance in anything Degas said on the subject. But his remarks are interesting and suggestive.

  "A picture is a combination of lines and colors that set each other off." 7 This definition, while by no means exhaustive, remains perhaps the one which best sets forth the fundamental characteristic of a picture having claims to being a work of art.

  "Nothing is finer than two shades of the same color in juxtaposition." 7

  "Light is orange, the shadow of flesh is red, the half-tones are green, and beware of white." 1 Being cited out of context, this aphorism remains obscure. A similar remark was recorded by Berthe Morisot. "Degas said, 'Orange colors, green neutralizes, and violet shades.' " 19 Individual painters occasionally find such rules of thumb valuable as directives for their own work but these rules are apt to prove misleading to others unless they are clarified by the artist himself.

  "Painting in oil one should proceed as with pastel." Ricketts who gives us this precept tells us that Degas meant one should proceed "by the juxtaposition of pastes considered in their opacity." 16Veronese, it may be noted in passing, depended for his effect on the translucency of oil paint. When a copyist matches the tones of a Veronese with opaque pigments the result is inharmonious. The above quotation indicates that Degas had in mind a very different type of color scheme at the time he talked to Ricketts and reminds us that his taste had first led him towards the Florentine painters in tempera and fresco rather than to the Venetians. Yet he had jotted down:

  "Try for the spirit and love of Mantegna combined with the dash and coloring of Veronese." 7

  Ambroise Vollard once found Degas spreading his pastels on a board in front of a window. "I take all the color out of them I can by putting them in the sun," the painter explained. When the dealer inquired what he used to get colors of such brightness, Degas retorted, "Dead color, sir." 3 To someone else he said, that the art of painting consisted of surrounding a patch of Venetian red so that it appeared to be a patch of vermilion. 16

  Degas apparently wished to emphasize the fact that brilliant color effects are obtained by finely adjusted tonal relationships rather than by bright paint. When these remarks were made, various new commercial colors were being put on sale. Painters were endeavoring to capture the most dazzling effects; brightly colored objects seen in sunlight, the hues ,of sunrise and sunset, the quality of sunlight itself. The new pigments then becoming available, such as the cadmiums, greatly increased the range of the painter's palette. It was widely believed that  these new materials and the then recently discovered trick of painting in a high key were destined to renovate the art of painting. And to some extent they did. But Degas, though he assimilated the new ideas, never lost sight of the fact that they were no substitute for artistry. It was probably to drive this point home that some of the above comments were made.

  After reading what he at one time said about the opacity of oil paint and the value of applying it after the manner of pastel, it is rather bewildering to hear from other reliable sources that Degas also used glazing techniques. The complex methods of the old masters became the dominant interest of his later years, according to Denis Rouart. 27 But even in the eighties Jeanniot had found this devotee of "pastes considered in their opacity" using glazes on one of his paintings of jockeys. "The foreground jockey had been established in profile on the right, his shirt painted pure white with a few grey shadows. Degas was wavering between yellow and rose as a coloring glaze, for this so-called 'Impressionist' liked the old methods, always the best in his opinion." 25 And in the last years the methods of the Venetians fascinated him most. Ernest Rouart felt that Degas might have executed masterpieces by using them had his sight not failed him. 19

  Degas himself said, "I have spent my life in trying-out," 27 And again, "Fortunately, I never found my manner." 27 Two remarks that reveal a great deal about his point of view.

  His way of making pictures has now emerged fairly clearly from these quotations. Degas went about observing the world around him with a mind sharpened and exalted by an intensive study of the greatest masters of painting, equipped with a highly developed visual memory, and having acquired the ability to make an accurate transcript of anything before his eyes, whenever it suited his purpose to do so. He was constantly on the alert to discover the unexpected, the unusual, the hitherto unpainted aspects of everyday life. He characterized his search by saying:

  "I want to look through keyholes." 10

  Early in his career he jots down in his notebook:

  "Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes." 6

  "Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candle light, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect of the lighting." 7

  Degas' niece years later recalled how her uncle used to persuade his relatives to pose for photographs which he then made use of in composing his paintings. 23 He liked to arrange the settings in the Japanese fashion; foregrounds of vases and lamps with the figures posed in the middle distance. Degas was known to use photography to study horses and the above indicates that he did so in other connections. He was one of the few painters possessing sufficient skill and knowledge to utilize the limited information obtainable from photographs with artistic results.

  "Be sure to give the same expression to a person's face that you give to his body. If laughter is characteristic of a person make him laughing." 6

  While Ricketts was posing for Degas, "Halevy pointed out that the collar of his covert-coat was half turned up and was proceeding to turn it down. Degas called out: 'Laissez. C'est bien.' Halcvy shrugged his shoulders and said, 'Degas cherche toujours l'accident.' " (Degas is always looking for the accidental.) 17

  The illustrated catalogues of the Degas sales provide many examples of his researches along these lines.

  Other entries in the notebooks are variants of the same lines.

  "Make a portrait of a lady wearing a hat, down to the waist after the manner of Janet (the wife of Charles IX) and in the scale of a Cranach (The Man in the Cap) , in water color, grey and rose, pale blue, in a high key, drawn as severely as possible. A muff into which she slips her handkerchief and her purse." 6

  "After doing some portraits seen from above I will make some seen from below. Sitting close to a sitter and looking at her from below I will see her head against the chandelier surrounded by crystals." 6

  "Study a figure or an object in every perspective. This can be done using a mirror, without leaving one's place. Themirror could be tipped or lowered. One could move around It." 6

  The notebooks here quoted were filled while Degas was still in his nyenties and some of his ideas may have proved to be impractical. But they reveal his method of seeking for new pictorial motives.

  This point of view was to lead to a completely novel presentation of the nude figure. He said himself: "Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience, but these women of mine are honest, simple folk, unconcerned by any other interests than those involved in their physical condition. Here is another; she is washing her feet. It is as if you looked through a keyhole." 11 And he also characterized these women of his as representing "the human animal taking care of itself; a cat licking herself." 11 At another time he said, rather wistfully, that he had perhaps observed the female form too exclusively from its animal aspects. 16 But in so doing he had revolutionized the treatment of the nude figure as material for art.

  Jeanniot gives us a quotation which relates Degas' own researches to an element he prized in the work of the masters. "Rembrandt," he said, "in his painting of Venus and Cupid, by breaking away from the traditional chubby and playful Cupid and by painting him as a little gypsy boy, a young tramp with dirty hands and an equivocal glance, has, in a perfectly natural way, endowed this superb picture with just that element of the unexpected which provokes thought and brings to our minds the dramatic idea which is inherent in all works of art in which the truth about life is expressed without compromise." 25

  Such then was his artistic philosophy. When he had noted an effect which suited his purpose, Degas retired to his studio and locked his door. There, in privacy, he worked out his idea, making use of the numerous devices which have long been appurtenances of the painter's trade. He hired professional models, as we have seen. He made small figurines in wax or clay from which he painted, Vollard, who penetrated the sanctum, tells us "the most heterogeneous objects were seen side by side. A bath, little wooden horses with which the artist composed his pictures of racecourses." 3Valery refers to a story that Degas made sketches of rocks at home, "using as models lumps of coal from the stove, spilling water on the table to make a lake." 19 J. Lewis-Brown related that Degas did his painting on the third floor with little wooden horses. "Of course Degas goes to the racecourses but it's in his studio, twiddling little wooden horses about in the light, that he succeeds in reconstituting nature." 3 And Degas himself said: "When I want a cloud I take my handkerchief and crumple it and turn it around till I get the right light and there is my cloud."16 These are a few samples of Degas' "trickeries." With the help of such devices he

organized his visual impressions into abstract patterns of supreme distinction, originality and expressIveness.

  Both Valery 19 and Sickert 16 report that Degas was particularly fond of the phrase "Homo additus naturae" as a definition of art. Valery thought Degas had picked up the phrase from Zola, who had found it in Francis Bacon. Zola had put the idea into words of his own when he called a work of art "Un coin de la creation vu a travers un temperament." That Degas also adhered to the principle that an artist should not allow his personality to obtrude is suggested by this note:

  "A painter must efface himself in the presence of the model, as LaTour did."

  But he was presumably deriding the literal setting-down of visual facts when he commented that "a snapshot [l'instantane] is photography, nothing more." 21

  His was an art based on the intensive study of a limited field rather than on extensity of subject matter.

  "I no longer want to see anything but my own corner and to work it devoutly, Art does not extend itself. It is a summing up," 21 he wrote from New Orleans.

  "You love and you make art only out of what you are accustomed to, The novel captivates and bores in turn." 21

  "That is my idea of genius, a man who finds a hand so lovely, so wonderful, so difficult to render that he will shut himself in all his life, content to do nothing but indicate fingernails." ll

  In this attitude he differed from many of his contemporaries. His was an era in which certain painters were traveling great distances in search of new.subject matter and some of them made fine pictures out of their exotic material. This was not the way of Degas.

  Because of his prestige in the twentieth-century art world Degas' interpretation of the painter's function deserves particular consideration in our age of confused artistic values. Until the early sixteenth century painters were regarded as specialized craftsmen capable of providing certain wares that were regularly in demand, such as the painted likenesses of individuals, decorations for wall spaces, or religious pictures for use in ceremonies and as votive offerings in churches. The individual's status as a painter depended on his ability to produce objects of this kind that were of sound and durable workmanship as well as pleasing to the purchasers. Then, following the lead of Leonardo da Vinci, painters began to assert their position as artists, that is, as interpreters Of an ideal rather than as craftsmen pure and simple. Nevertheless the strict regulations established by guilds and academies, without whose sanction no painter could prosper, maintained the standards of craftsmanship until the close of the eighteenth century. As the nineteenth century progressed painters became increasingly free to pattern their activities according

to individual temperament, some leaning towards the craftsman-producer type, others to that of the artist-interpreter. It then became apparent how deeply the character of a painter's work was marked by whether he envisaged his art primarily as a craft or as a means of self-expression. "Modern" painting has demonstrated what can happen when the emphasis shifts completely to the latter acceptation without a compensating interest in or knowledge of the craftsman's approach.

  Although he was a learned and highly skilled executant as well as an artist of unassailable integrity Degas considered himself dedicated to an ideal which did not take the public into consideration: "Is painting done to be seen? One works for two or three living friends, for others one hasn't known or who are dead." 7 "I would like to be illustrious and unknown." 7 "Painting is a part of private life." 7 Valery felt that Degas had discovered so many difficulties in painting, or had introduced them into painting, that he came to conceive of it as something incommunicable to the ordinary man "who suspects neither the subtlety of its objectives, nor the complexity of its procedures, nor the nobility or illtelligence of its composition, nor the strength or delicacy of its execution." 19 Degas' conclusions in these respects do not differ greatly from those of many other thoughtful painters. But he allowed them to affect his work to a regrettable extent. "A work of an for him," Valery continues, "was the result of innumerable sketches and then of a series of operations. I think he believed such a work could never be considered finished." 19 His habit of borrowing his pictures from their owners for retouching and of never returning them became notorious. He is known to have ruined a number of admirable pictures by his attempts to improve them. Even more striking was his way of leaving paintings in an unfinished state.

  This last trait in particular can be deceptive. For Degas did not abandon his paintings because of an incapacity to complete them. His ability in this respect is demonstrated by the pictures which he did carry to a high degree of finish. The remarkable thing about the unfinished canvases and pastels is that they were put aside after the greatest difficulties presented by the problem in hand had been overcome.* The arabesque of a composition had been effectively established, a color scheme had been worked out to the artist's satisfaction, the most illusive placements had been correctly related in a drawing. What remained to be done would have been routine to a painter of Degas' virtuosity. But at this point he appears to have lost interest and to have put his mind on some new problem. The urge of the artisan to turn out finished wares, which is part of the make-up of many painters, Degas lacked. Fine as most of his incomplete works are, they set an example which has proved perilous to less accomplished practitioners.

  ______________

  *This does not apply to the work of his late years, the loose handling of which was due to failing eyesight.

  As we have seen, Degas was well aware of the intellectual traits which were responsible for the eventual sidetracking of so many projects; his desire for perfection, his comprehension of artistically incompatible points of view, his insatiable curiosity.

Remarks already quoted indicate that he took pride in the versatility of his mind, and he did so with justice. But we also discover that he was aware of its dangers. "I long for order. I dream of something well made, an organized whole (in the style of Poussin) and an old age like that of Corot." 21 And he speaks of Bouguereau "whose energy and workmanship I do not expect to attain." 21

  But no artist was ever more uncompromising in the pursuit of his esthetic ideal than he. His contemporaries respected his absolute integrity and feared his criticism. "That man is the only one I fear,"25 Alfred Stevens had said. Bonnat, the friend of his student years from whom he later drifted away, exclaimed that after discussing art with Degas he remained disgusted with his own work for a long period. 24 Years later, memher of the Institut, extremely wealthy, loaded with official honors, Bonnat ran into the elderly Degas and the conversation turned to a possible exchange of pictures, "But you don't like what I paint," the famous portrait painter hazarded. "Oh! well, Bonnat, what would you have? We have each gone our own way," replied Degas with considerable embarrassment. l9Blanche always remembered Degas' famous, "In my time one did not arrive," as a kind of leitmotiv in their relationship. 20 He liked to call Degas a moralist. And, indeed, the often quoted aphorisms of this incorruptible painter havc contributed to the maintenance of our artistic standards much as the spoken wisdom of ancient sages has served to exalt our standards in the conduct of life throughout the centuries.

  "I must make myself fully aware that I know nothing. It is the only way to get ahead." 7

  "One must have an exalted idea, not of what one does, but of what one will some day accomplish. Otherwise there is no use working." He was seventy when he said this to Ernest Rouart. 19

  "Work is the only possession you can make use of whenever you want it." 7

  "Painting is not very difficult when you don't know how. . . but when you know. . . oh! then, it's another matter." 19

  "It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle." 7

  "Everybody has talent at twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty."

  "What a fine thing it is to have natural gifts and facility and how essential it is to have other things besides!" 21

  "It is not difficult to get life into a six-hour study. The difficulty is to retain it there in sixty." 22

  And continually we find reiterated, like the refrain in a ballad, the withering phrase directed at the arriviste, at the seeker of cheap success, at the painter ready to sacrifice artistic integrity for the sake of notoriety or money:

  "Monsieur, de mon temps on n'arrivait pas."

  "Sir, in my day one did not 'make good.' " 2 

IV. 

  Degas' shrewd and penetrating criticisms of the work of other painters make intensely interesting reading. They represent the thinking of a master workman evaluating the way in which his colleagues had coped with their professional problems. Because they are the criticisms of a painter who knew what he was talking about, these comments retain a permanent value and painters will always profit by studying them and by applying their lessons to their own efforts. Furthermore they serve to throw light on a great painter's understanding of the nature of painting. Because the comments were usually made in the give-and-take of conversation we should be prepared for overstatements due to emotion or to prejudice. In point of fact these are infrequent. With one or two exceptions the quotations which follow are as wise as they are pungent. I will set them down as they come to hand, in no particular order. 

  Degas greatly admired Delacroix. He purchased as many of this artist's pictures as he could, saying that they were the cheapest "buy" in great masters. 7 He even asserted that Delacroix was one of the three great draftsmen of the nineteenth century, 25 the other two being Ingres and Daumier. He once told Puvis de Chavannes that he considered Delacroix' "Femmes d'Alger" to be one of the greatest works of painting, a statement which surprised Puvis.1 And speaking of the crayon drawings from which Millet executed his paintings Degas remarked that they were not "spotted in a painterlike way" and so did not lend themselves to the development of rich and warm color schemes as did the drawings of Delacroix. 29  

  He could not find words to express what he thought of Velasquez. He wrote from Madrid, which he was visiting with Baldini, that "nothing, no, nothing, can convey any idea of Velasquez." 21Speaking to the Goncourts, he referred to the Spaniard's "delicate muddiness" (boueux tendre). 1 But looking at paintings by nineteenth-century admirers of the great Spaniard, he exclaimed. "O Velasquez! what filthy things are perpetrated in your name!" 17  

  Daumier he esteemed very highly, asserting that he had a genuine "sense of the antique." 25  

  "If Raphael were to see a Cabanel he would say, 'Oh dear! That's my fault.' But looking at a Daumier he would chuckle, 'Ha! Ha!' " 1 In a variant of this story Gerome is

substituted for Cabanel, 22 a change that probably was made as the anecdote was retold. It is not applicable to Gerome's art as it is to that of Cabanel and we have evidence that Degas respected Gerome.  

  Degas liked Zuloaga's work. "At any rate you don't put any air in your pictures," 24 he said to the Spaniard. And elsewhere he exclaimed: "Thank goodness! He paints flat." 24 To someone else he pointed out a painting of Zuloaga's, saying, "He has the strength of fifteen-hundred horsepower, that fellow!" 25  

  He had no very great opinion of his friend Manet as an artist and Manet was constantly upset by Degas' intellectual restlessness. After Manet's death, however, Degas was wont to say, "We did not know he was so strong." 20 But he had told Berthe Morisot that her hrother-in-Iaw* "was the most mannered painter in the world although he prided himself on slavishly copying nature, never making a brush-stroke without thinking of the masters; for instance painting hands without fingernails because Franz Hals did not draw them in." 19 And the "Bar aux Folies-Bergeres" Degas termed "dull and subtle." 4 He later reproached Manet for having abandoned his "magnificent prune juice in order to paint light." 3

  ________

  *Manet 

  Once when he was deriding landscape painters who did their painting "on the spot" he made an exception for Renoir. "Renoir, that isn't the same thing. He can do what he chooses." 18  

  Someone said to him of Lautrec, "I think he dresses rather in your clothes." "Remodeling them to suit himself," 18 retorted Degas. 

  His witticism about Fantin-Latour became famous. "His work is very gauche. What a pity it is always a little rivegauche." 3 The pun does not bear translation. 

  Traveling about Italy as a young man he was deeply impressed by Giotto's frescoes at Assisi. He jotted down in his notebooks: "Ah! those people felt life. They never denied life. . . . May I be of their breed if I ever develop a character of enough conviction and stability to paint pictures that are tantamount to sermons." 6 When he had returned to Paris he wrote: "O Giotto! teach me to see Paris, and you, Paris, teach me to see Giotto." 6 It is surprising to read that Degas, towards the end of his career, said it had been the dream of his life to paint a mural but that nobody had ever approached him about one. 15 

  Gauguin's work he admired, "only reproaching him for having gone to the end of the earth to paint. 'Cannot one paint just as well in the Batignolles,' he would say, 'as in

Tahiti?' "3 We have already seen evidences of this particular prejudice against exotic subjects. 

  The quips he made about the work of his Impressionist friends are often revealing. "Berthe Morisot paints pictures as she would trim hats." 24 He blamed the invariably dark backgrounds which Fantin-Latour used for his flowers. "Has he never seen any on a woman's corsage?" 24 Cezanne he thought little of. 13, 22 He termed Monet's art that of a "skillful but not profound decorator." But he had great respect for his skill. "That darned Monet! Everything he does is in plumb right off, while I give myself all this trouble and it isn't right." (Translation) . 16 And he called him a "monster, so abnormal was what he set out to accomplish, although the results were extraordinary." 1 Renoir he defined as "a cat playing with balls of wool" 3 Passing his hand over a painting by his friend he exclaimed, "Lord, what a lovely texture!" 3 His criticism of Sisley was that his terrains always remained a little fluttery and lacking in geological base (assise) .16 Speaking to the Impressionists as a group he told them that what they required was natural life whereas he needed artificial life. 11 And he brilliantly defined the attitude of certan influential official painters with regard to the Impressionists by saying, "They shoot us but they rifle our pockets." 7  

  Among the moderns he wholeheartedly admired Millet, Ingres, and the earlier work of Corot. 16 His deep respect for Ingres is well known. "There was a gentleman one didn't trifle with," 19 he said to Sickert, pointing to Ingres' self-portrait in the Louvre. When someone said that Ingres made his figures out of zinc, "Perhaps," retorted Degas, "but then he is a genius at using zinc." 18 His admiration for the master did not decrease with the passing years and he made a journey to Montauban in 1897 to study the great collection of Ingres drawings in the museum there. He claimed that Ingres' great contribution lay in his having returned to an emphasis on arabesque as opposed to the drawing based solely on proportion in vogue among David's pupils.19 

  Degas and Puvis de Chavannes were good friends. They were apt to meet at dinner in certain houses, such as that of Mrs. Meredith Howland. That Degas could appreciate the art of Puvis is an instance of the breadth of his artistic understanding. For the great painter-decorator lacked many of the qualities that Degas prized and he based his art on two things notably absent in Degas, poetic imagination and a feeling for the monumental. But Degas said of his compositions: "No one has found in like degree the proper placement of the figures in a composition. Try moving one of his figures by an inch, by a dot. You won't succeed. It's impossible," 24  

  "What a great painter missed-out this Gericault was! He realized his inability to make the grade, and that with his fortune, his sureness of hand and everything else. There is something of Bandinelli in this unfortunate Gaul!" 7  

  Whistler was known to fear Degas' wit and several passages between the two painters have become classics. Here, however, we are only concerned with Degas on painting. Of Whistler's art he said, "He draws by distances, not by thicknesses." 24 And he pointed out

that Whistler's portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell was "retreating into Watteau's cellar," (Translation.) 17 

  "From Italy to Spain, from Greece to Japan, there is not very much difference in technique; everywhere it is a question of summing up life in its essential gestures, and the rest is the business of the artist's eye and hand," 9 

  "He thinks," he said, speaking of Bonnat's later work, "that the outdoor air is intended for breathing only," 14 

  "If you want to sell your pictures nowadays you have got to paddle in flake white," (Translation.) 17 This is clearly a reference to the fashion for painting in a high key, often to the point of chalkiness, that followed the Impressionist experiments. 

  Jean-Paul Laurens found Degas standing before one of his paintings and began to explain his subject. "I believe Clodomir is getting the hell out because he feels out of harmony with his background," 7 jeered Degas. 

  He called Meissonier "the giant of dwarfs," 19 and clearly had great respect for the little man's knowledge. Valery heard him expatiate on the correctness of the horse in a statuette by Meissonier representing Napoleon on horseback. 19 Another time, at the races, Degas looked at some horsemen through his field glasses for a while, then, turning to Detaille who was with him, he said, "They look like Meissoniers,"19  

  He had but little esteem for Sargent and Helleu. 22 His calling the latter painter a "Watteau a vapeur" became a celebrated mot. 

  Degas was a lifelong friend of Gustave Moreau but he found his art unsympathetic. "He wants us to believe that the gods wore watch chains," 25 he laughed. And on his way out of the Musee Gustave Moreau he exclaimed: "It is really sinister. It feels like a catacomb. All these canvases remind one of a thesaurus, of a Gradus ad Parnassum." 19 

  The spectacular rise and fall of Besnard has been pretty much forgotten away from Paris. But he was an extraordinarily promising painter at one time and he subsequently attained a great position in the art world, though the quality of his work deteriorated inexplicably. Degas told Jeanniot in 1900 that he saw genuine talent in the man. But the sarcasms he directed at Besnard became notorious."Il vole de nos propres ailes," 8 which is untranslatable because of the pun on the word vole. Equally so is another: "Un pompier qui a pris feu." 7 And again: "Besnard! Ah! yes! There are people who swipe your watch and then wear it on a different chain." 8 

  Valery pointed out a Theodore Rousseau in the Louvre. "It's superb," he said, "but what a chore to make all those leaves. It must have been an awful bore." "Hush!" retorted Degas. "If it were not boring it would not be fun." 19  

  He said of the pictures of J. M. Sert: "Don't worry. They can be deflated." 7 

  About Roll's "Le Travail": "There are fifty figures in it but I don't see the crowd. You make a crowd out of five figures, not out of fifty." 7 

  Of the pictures of Le Sidaner: "It isn't painting, it's a soul state." 24 Sarcasm or praise; who shall say? 

  Again an untranslatable quip, this time about Eugene Carriere. "Carriere, c'est un cerveau," said someone. Few today recall the seriousness with which this singular painter's murky pictures were once taken. "Plutot une cervelle au beurre noir," snapped Degas. 24 

  The relations between Degas and Gerome, already mentioned in passing, require special consideration. Throughout the last fifty years Gerome has been judged almost entirely through the eyes and writings of the Impressionist painters, their followers and their historians, while his pictures have not been really studied at all. For instance, we find his teaching belittled on the evidence of such a misfit in his atelier as Odilon Redon, 9 whose talent, very individual but slight and delicate, could not possibly have assimilated the learning and skill of such a master. But the contrary opinions of the many sound draftsmen who have proclaimed their debt to Gerome as a teacher are ignored by present-day writers. True, Gerome's inability to appreciate the art of the Impressionist group is a historical fact and his opposition to the acceptance of the legs Caillebotte by the French government in 1893 is also a regrettable matter of history. From the point of view of these fine landscape painters Gerome appeared to be the personification of esthetic obtuseness and reactionary stupidity. 

  This view is certainly incomplete. Gerome's understanding of the art of painting was incomparably broader and deeper than that of any member of the Impressionist group excepting Degas, and of that group only Degas equaled Gerome's command of the painter's craft, surpassing him in certain respects and falling a little short of him in others. Both were extraordinarily competent painters by the standards of any age. Both were exceptionally fine draftsmen, Degas' superiority in this field lying in the greater esthetic interest of those aspects of form which he elected to stress. Both men composed their pictures by balanced arabesques of great distinction and originality, Gerome sometimes carrying his to a greater degree of complexity and finish whereas Degas preferred to emphasize larger aspects and more individual patterns. Gerome was the better workman of the two, Degas the more open-minded explorer of new artistic possibilities. Both painters will be held in honor by future generations as great figures in the art of the nineteenth century. 

  The two men remained excellent friends for some forty years. During that time they met frequently and enjoyed discussing painting together. One wishes more had been recorded about this friendship but we know enough to judge its quality. We have seen that for years they lunched regularly at the same table. Later they met at various dinner tables

where they were habitual guests. And jeanniot tells us of a walk through the Paris streets with Degas in 1900  during which the conversation turned on Gerome. Degas and Gerome had recently been discussing Daumier, whom Gerome admired very little. It was then that Degas had asserted that the nineteenth century had produced three great draftsmen, Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier. Shortly afterwards he had received as a gift from "cet excellent Gerome" a Daumier lithograph. While Degas was telling Jeanniot about this incident, Gerome himself, then seventy-six, caught up with the two pedestrians and, after some very cordial interchanges, hurried off with the step of a young man despite the fact that he had attended a banquet in honor of Gavarni which had broken up at a very late hour the night before. 

  Degas then told jeanniot why he did not like Gerome's "Phryne Before the Areopagus." He felt that Gerome had misinterpreted the Greek attitude towards physical beauty and that, by making Phryne appear ashamed, he had managed to make a pornographic picture. Degas added that, of course, Gerome, "ce galant homme," had not intended to do so. 25 

  Years earlier Gerome offered some criticisms about one of Degas' paintings of classic subjects; one report says it was the "Young Spartans," another the "Semiramis." Only Degas' reply is recorded. "I suppose," he said drily, "it isn't 'Turkish' enough for you." 24  

  These differences of opinion are of the type to be expected when two thoroughly professional painters discuss each other's work. In the above instances both critics were right. Degas put his finger on the latent vulgarity which only too frequently mars Gerome's pictures. On the other hand it is pretty clear, from Degas' retort, that Gerome had suggested to his younger friend that the sense of remoteness in time and place demanded by classical subjects depends upon very careful selection of the accessories. Degas had no feeling for this sort of thing and wisely abandoned that type of subject matter early in his career, never to return to it. 

  Finally we come to the most singular comment authentically ascribed to Degas, the only one for which I am unable to find any justification. It has been frequently cited and the story must be in substance accurate. It is reported by Arsene Alexandre, among others, who had it from Henri Rouart. The conversation took place between Gerome and Degas at the Cafe de la Rochefoucauld in the presence of several painters and of Rouart himself. Gerome, it would seem, remarked that Degas could not seriously claim that Corot drew trees well. "Yes, indeed," answered Degas, "and I will add that he draws figures no less well." 12 The second part of this statement is, to say the least, startling. A second version has Degas saying that Corot drew figures "even better" 19 than he drew trees, while, in a third version, he goes so far as to assert that Corot drew figures better than either Gerome or Degas. 24 "Just another wisecrack," was Gerome's dictum. "Now then, don't argue! You see that he is handing out one of his paradoxes," said a bystander.  

  V. 

 Pieced together, these odds and ends of Degas' conversation form a compilation of extraordinary interest. Only two other artists of the first rank, Leonardo da Vinci and Ingres, have left verbal records of their professional thinking which are of comparable value to practicing painters. Of the three documents Leonardo's "Treatise" remains the most remarkable by virtue of the towering genius of the author but, because his ideas and principles have long since been assimilated and are now part of the painter's stock in trade, the book may seem antiquated to the contemporary student. The collection of maxims written down by the students of Ingres or gleaned from his correspondence reflect that painter's relatively limited but deeply pondered artistic outlook. Their value to a painter prepared to penetrate their meaning can hardly be overestimated. Degas' experimental turn of mind and widely ranging curiosity relate his thinking more closely to Leonardo's than to that of Ingres. All three painters have in common an eminently practical and reasoned approach to their professional problems. They are concerned with the ways and means by which desired pictorial effects can be arrived at or necessary skills can be acquired. All three are speaking of an art which they have mastered, each in his particular way, as completely as it has been given to any man so to do. 

 In the decades lying immediately ahead the precepts of Degas will probably be found the most applicable. The pictorial problems with which he grappled three-quarters of a century ago are still of paramount importance for painters convinced that durably

interesting pictures are most often the result of finely interpreted representation integrated with expressive abstract patterning. The dichotomy brought about by the impressionist schism has not yet been resolved. The need today is for a renovated pictorial language which incorporates the essential elements on which the so-called academic tradition was originally based without losing sight of the qualities rightly valued by the nineteenth-century impressionist reaction. Properly understood the two ideals should not be mutually exclusive but complementary. This is just what Degas demonstrated in his own admirable art as well as in his talk. 

 SOURCES

(Asterisks indicate that the O1'iginal was in French, which I have tmnslated) 

1.* DEGAS by Henri Hertz

      Felix Alcan, Paris, 1920 

2. PORTRAITS OF A LIFETIME by Jacques-Emile Blanche

      Coward-~IcCann, Inc., New York, 1938 

3. RECOLLECTIONS OF A PICTURE DEALER by Ambroise VolIard

      Little. Brown &: Co.. Boston, 1936 

4. THE REALISM OF DEGAS by John Rewald

      Magazine of Art, January, 1946 

5.* DEGAS ET SON MODELE by Alice Michel

      Mercure de France, 1919 

6.* LES CARNETS DE DEGAS by P. A. Lemoisne

      Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1921 

7.* DEGAS, SA VIE ET SON OEUVRE by P. A. Lemoisne

      Paul Brame et C. M. de Hauke aux Arts et

      Metiers Graphiques, Paris, 1946 

8.* EXTRAITS DU JOUR:\AL INEDIT DE PAUL SIGNAC, 1894-1895

      Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1949 

9. THE HISTORY OF IMPRESSIONISM by John Rewald

          Museum of Modern Art, New York

          Distributed by Simon and Schuster, 1946 

10. DEGAS by WALTER SICKERT

          Burlington Magazine, November, 1917 

11. IMPRESSIONS AND OPINIONS by George Moore

              T. Werner Laurie, Ltd. London, 1913 

12. LA COLLECTION HENRI ROUART by Arscne Alexandre

               Les Arts, 1912  

13. LES ARTS PLASTIQUES by Jacques-Emile Blanche  

14. LEON BONNAT by Leonce Benedite

         Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1923 

15. A PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF DEGAS by Walter Sicken

         Burlington Magazine, December, 1917 

16. WALTER SICKERT by Robert Emmons

      Faber & Faber Ltd., London, 1941

17. A FREE HOUSE - The Writings of Walter Sickert

      Macmillan, London, 1947 

18. DEGAS DANCERS by Lillian Browse

      The Studio Publications (Inc.), New York, N.Y. 

19. * DEGAS, DANSE, DESSIN by Paul Valery

      Librairie GaIlimard, Paris, 1938 

20. * NOTES SUR LA PEINTURE MODERNE by Jacques-Emile Blanche

      Revue de Paris, 19 I 3 

21.* LETTRES DE DEGAS} recueillies par Marcel Guerin

      Editions Bernard Grasset, Paris, 1931 

22. MEN AND MEMORIES by William Rothenstein

      Coward-McCann, New York, 1931 

23. DEGAS AS HIS FAMILY KNEW HIM by Jean Nepveu-Degas

      In catalogue for an exhibition at Knoedler's, 1955 

24.* DEGAS by Paul Lafond

      H. Floury, Paris, 1918 

25. SOUVENIRS SUR DEGAS by Georges Jeanniot

      La Revue Universelle, 15 October

      and 15 November, 1933, Paris 

26. THE TRAINING OF THE MEMORY IN ART by Lecoq de Boisbaudran

      Translated from the French by L. D. Luard

      Macmillan and Co., Ltd., London, 1914 

27. DEGAS A LA RECHERCHE DE SA TECHNIQUE by Denis Rouart

      Floury, Paris, 1945 

28. DEGAS by Gustave Coquiot

      Librairie Ollendorff, Paris 

29. PROPOS DE PEINTRE DE DAVID A DEGAS by Jacques-Emile Blanche

      Emile-Paul Freres, Paris, 1919

30. ALBUM DE DESSINS AVEC PREFACE DE DANIEL HALEVY

      Quatre-Chemins, Paris   

Index 

Abstract from visual.. . . . . . . .32

Academic tradition.. 6. 7. 9, 13,14. 46, 47

Accidental effects. . . . . .20. 22. 30

Alexandre. Arsene. . . . . . . . . . . 45

Art, a summing up. . . .29, 32. 41

Art, deceit. . . . . . . . . . . . . .18, 20

Art school system attacked. . . .10

Artistic integrity. . . . . . . . . . . . .36

Bacon. Francis. . . . . . . . . . . . . .32

Bandinelli……………………..41

Barrias, Felix. . . . . . . . . . . . . .6, 7

Bartholome, sculptor. . . . . . . . .21

Besnard, Albert. . . . . . . . . . . . .42

Blanche, Jacques-Emile.. 2. 3. 4, 11. 12. 24

Boisbaudran, Lecoq de. .14. 15.21

Boldini  38

Bonnat. Leon. .8.10.41

Cabanel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..38

Caillebotte legacy 43

Carriere. Eugene 42

Cassatt, Mary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12

Cezanne. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39

Chasseriau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

Color. Colorist. . . . . 20. 22. 24-29

Cormon . ..  9

Corot. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19. 40, 45

Craft and self-expression. . . . . .19

Cranach…………………………… . 30

Daumier. . . . . . . . . . . . .37. 38, 44

David. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40

Da Vinci, Leonardo. . . . . .21, 46

Delacroix. . . . . . . . . II, 25, 37, 44

Delaunay. Elie. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8

Dctaille . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41

Draftsmen. .7, 12, 15.21,37,43,44

Drawing. . . . . . . . . .15. 16. 22, 23

Early training. . . . . . . . . .6-10. 13

Fantin-Latour. . . . . . .4, 8, 15, 39

Flandrin. Hippolyte 7

Flatness in painting. . . . . .25, 26

Gauguin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39

Gavarni . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44

Gcricault. 41

Gcr6me. Jean Leon. . . .9. 10. 38. 43-45

Giotto ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39

Goncourt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38

Gueroult. l'vlaurice. . .2. 11. 12. 16

Manet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9, 18. 38

Mantegna. . . . . . . . . . . .21. 25. 28

Matisse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

Meissonier. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9. 41

Memory training. .10. 1 I. 14. 15.21

Millet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37. 40

Models. . . . . . . .11, 13-15, 19, 23, 29-32

Monet, Claude .6.19,39

Moore. George. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

Moreau, Gustave .8,42

Morisot. Berthe. . . .10, 27. 38. 39

Halevy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30

Hals, Franz 38

HeIleu, Paul 42

Hertz. Henri 2

Holbein. . . . . . . . . . . . .10. 20. 21

Humbert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. .9

Impressionist. .6, 9, 29, 39, 40, 41.43.47

Ingres. .3,7.8. 15, 16.21.37.40.44.46

Intellectual art .17, 38

Interpretation. . . .1-5. 16, 46, 47

Jeanniot. Pierre-Georges... 2. 10. 12,19,21,23,24,27.29.31. 42. 44

Jongkind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Keyhole poin t of view. . . . 29. 31

Lamothe, Louis. . . . . . . . . . . .7. 8

La Tour. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32

Laurens, Jean-PauL .41

Lautrec 39

Legros. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8, 15

Lemoisne, P. A.. . . . . . . . . . . . .13

LeroIle, Henri. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

Le Sidaner. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42

Lewis-Brown, J .32

Picasso. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Pissarro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Puvis De Chavannes. . . .9, 37, 40

Raphael.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 21, 38

Redon, Odilon. . . . . . . . . . . . . .43

Regnault. Henri 8

Rembrandt. . . . . . . . . . .20.25.31

Renoir. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39. 40

Ricard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Ricketts .. .. .20.27,28. 30

Roll. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42

Rothenstein. William.. 2. 12. 13, 16.26

Rouart. Denis. . . . . . . .25. 29

Rouart. Ernest. .2. 12. 24. 25. 29. 36 . . .

Rouart. Henri…. 45

Rousseau, Theodore…..42

Rubens. . . . . .42

Sargent. John. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42

Sert. J. M………….42

Sickert. Walter. 2. 4. 12. 16. 17, 32.40

Sisley. . . . . ..40

Sources of quoted material. .48. 49

Stevens. Alfred. . . . . . . . . . . .9. 24

Tissot, James. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15

Titian. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26

Valery. Paul. .3. 4. 15, 16, 18. 32. 41.42

Velasquez. . . . . . . . . . . .20, 26. 38

Vermeer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20. 26

Veronese. . . . . . . . . . . .26. 27, 28

Vollard, Ambroise. . . . . . . .28. 31

Watteau. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41, 42

Whistler. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21. 41

Zola . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32

Zuloaga ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38