Edgar Degas

Estate of the artist (sold: Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, 4ème Vente Degas, 2nd-4th July 1919, lot 20)
Henri Cottevieille, Paris (purchased at the above sale)
Private Collection, France (by descent from the above. Sold: Sotheby's, London, 29th June 1999, lot 228)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek & Ohio, Columbus Museum of Art, Edgar Degas: The Last Landscapes, 2006-07, no. 85, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Paul-André Lemoisne, Degas et son œuvre, Paris, 1946, vol. III, no. 1217, illustrated p. 706
Jacques Lassaigne & Fiorella Minervino, Tout l'œuvre peint de Degas, Paris, 1974, no. 1180a, illustrated

Executed on grey paper, possibly laid down onto another sheet of paper, attached to the mount at intervals along the reverse of all four edges. There are several artist's pinholes in places. Apart from some paper infills to the edges, mainly to the upper and lower edges, slight abrasions, and some time staining, this work is in good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although slightly richer in the original.
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This beautifully executed pastel of a country road in Saint-Valéry, the resort town along the estuary of the Somme, is among Degas' rare and most technically sophisticated landscapes. The work is one of the fifteen depictions of Saint-Valéry that Degas completed in the late 1890s, and this particular view is most closely related to an oil version now in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek in Copenhagen. In his survey of Degas' landscapes, Richard Kendall singles out the Saint-Valéry series for their unexpected break from Degas' usual aesthetic and for their influence on the development of avant-garde landscape painting in the decades to come. He points out that while little scholarly attention has been paid to these pictures, '[w]here they have been mentioned, if only in passing, startling claims have been made on their behalf:  The influence of Gauguin on one of the canvases has been noted by Jean Boggs; their 'abstracted shapes' have suggested 'proto-Fauvist colours' to Ronald Pickvance; and an anticipation of the forms of Cubism has been proposed by Denys Sutton' (R. Kendall, Degas Landscapes, New Haven & London, 1993,  p. 249).

Degas had visited Saint-Valéry numerous times as a child while on holiday with his family, and his brother René bought a house there three decades later. It was on one of these visits to his brother in 1898 that Degas completed this pastel, surrounded by landmarks of his past. According to Jeanne Raunay, the artist's depictions of Saint-Valéry are rich with personal symbolism: 'Degas loved to return to this little town where his parents had taken him as a child. He found there everything he had once enjoyed: the sea with all its surprises, roads, bordered by old houses, the walls of a ruined tower, a monumental gate under which Joan of Arc had passed; but above all, he would rediscover the first memories of his childhood, and he could recall those he had loved' (quoted in ibid., p. 258). The present composition, like the related canvas, depicts the wide, overgrown path along the rue de Quesnoy, with its ivy covered walls and stone cottages in the distance. According to Kendell, the present work is one of two pastel versions of this precise vantage, and it is believed to have been done en plein air for later completion of the oil in his studio. 

This work has been requested by Martin Schwander for the exhibition Edgar Degas held at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, scheduled for 30th September 2012 - 27th January 2013.