The Private Collection of Edgar Degas - Softcover

Dumas, Ann; Ives, Colta; Stein, Susan Alyson; Tinterow, Gary

9780300203615: The Private Collection of Edgar Degas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300203616 ISBN 13: 9780300203615

Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013

The art collection assembled by Edgar Degas was remarkable not only for its quality, size, and depth but also for its revelation of Degas's artistic affinities. He acquired great numbers of works by the nineteenth-century French masters Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier; he bought (or bartered his own pictures for) art by many of his contemporaries, particularly Manet, C�zanne, Gauguin, and Cassatt; and he acquired works by a wide range of other artists, from eminent to little known. The extent of Degas's holdings was not recognized until after his death, when the collection came up for auction in Paris in 1918 and, in what was called the sale of the century, was widely dispersed.

Extensive research has made it possible to "reassemble" that collection in book form. This summary catalogue contains information on the more than five thousand works owned by Degas. For each work catalogued the entry includes, to the extent possible: a description with medium and dimensions; provenance information about Degas's acquisition and ownership of the work; information pertaining to the sale of the work in 1918 (or its disposal earlier), including the purchaser, purchase price, and other data; the current location; selected references; and an illustration. In a concordance, collection sale lot numbers are listed with their corresponding summary catalogue numbers. Previously, knowledge was fragmentary about the contents of Degas's collection and the whereabouts of those works. The authors of the summary catalogue accomplished their task by combing through a variety of sources, including annotated sale catalogues Degas's handwritten manuscript containing his own partial inventory, dealers' records, archives, and the contents of print and drawing study rooms, as well as by addressing inquiries to dealers, collectors, and curators, and by consulting important earlier scholarly work. While gaps remain that will surely be addressed by art historians in the future, this summary catalogue, with its wealth of new findings and its comprehensive organization, makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the subject, as well as to our understanding of this exceptional artist's collection. [This book was originally published in 1997 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

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Review:

When Edgar Degas died in 1917, his heirs found crate after crate gathering dust in the rented rooms inhabited by the isolated old artist. The opened containers revealed one of the greatest personal art collections of all time: There were paintings, drawings, and prints by El Greco, Ingres, Delacroix, Daumier, Cassatt, Manet, van Gogh, C�zanne, and Degas himself, including the famous Bellelli Family, a work from his youth that Degas could never bear to part with. When his heirs auctioned off the collection in 1918, governments granted national museums special funds to make purchases, even though it was the height of World War I and money was tight. The museums, it turned out, were also aided by the war--on the day of the sale, cannon fire sent most bidders running for cover. The ones who remained got bargain prices. This gorgeous book is filled with color plates of many of the paintings, and its 14 thoughtful essays are invaluable to comprehending the tastes of a single artist, one with the eye and the wherewithal to put together such an amazing collection.

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

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