Edgar Degas

Durand-Ruel, Paris
Tadasama Hayashi, Paris (acquired from the above)
M. Knoedler & Co., New York
John Quinn, New York
Arthur B. Davies, New York
Katherine D. Murdoch, New York
Sam Salz, New York (and sold: Parke-Bernet Galleries, Inc., New York, March 31, 1949, lot 184)
J. Rousset, New York (acquired at the above sale)
Acquired by 1985

Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, 1892, n.n.

Tadamasa Hayashi, Catalogue of the Collection of Tadamasa Hayashi, 1908, n.p.
Phillipe Brame & Theodore Reff, Degas et son oeuvre: A Supplement, New York, 1984, no. 136, illustrated p. 148
Ronald Pickvance, Edgar Degas, Tokyo, 1988, p. 253
Marie K. Meller, "Exercises in and around Degas's classroom" in Burlington Magazine, July 1993, p. 460
Richard Kendall, Degas Landscapes, New Haven & London, 1993, fig. 197, illustrated p. 218

This work is in very good condition. The sheet is not laid down, but is adhered to a board along the lower edge, and the lower third part of the right edge. The colors are bright and fresh. The medium is stable and is in excellent condition. There are two vertical tears at the top right corner. One approximately two inches in length, the other one in in length. The former encroaches about half an inch into the image, whereas the other is only to the margin. There is a further tear to the extreme right edge of the right margin approximately one and half inches in length. There is a loss to the paper approximately 1/4 of an inch to the right of the extreme right edge. Note that neither of these are visible when the work is in its mount.. There is minor foxing to the paper in the upper left quadrant.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

The present work was part of Degas’ important and sensational exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1892—not only his first and only personal show, but an exhibition that would prove to be a breakthrough for the brand new process of color print-making. Perhaps the most shocking of all was the subject matter Degas chose to exhibit, pivoting away from the reputation he had built on depicting ballerinas, laundresses and nudes and focusing instead on landscapes. In part because Degas publicized himself as the premier painter of the human figure, his production of landscapes has been largely overlooked.  

In fact, Degas made landscapes throughout his career in a variety of media, but “it was in the decade of the 1890s, however, that Degas’ diverse encounters with the landscape bore the most spectacular fruit” (Richard Kendall, op. cit., p. viii).

Paysage was part of a suite of color monotypes begun in Burgundy in 1890 after a twenty-day carriage trip with his companion Paul-Albert Bartholomé. The countryside they traversed, modest in scale and sometimes hilly and rocky, inspired Degas’ exploration of color and texture. According to Richard Kendall’s classification of the monotypes by dimensions, this work was likely made in the peintre-graveur Georges Jeanniot’s studio in the autumn of 1890, during his first encounter with the medium of color printing (ibid., pp. 172-73).

Exemplary of the influences of Japanese prints and also of the work of J.M.W. Turner on Degas, this monotype is altogether “a remarkable and suggestive confection of cliffs, boulders and a distant road” (ibid., p. 208). In its composition, Degas leans on the analogy between the human form and the landscape “as he dissolves a boulder into a woman’s torso, her limbs into folds of earth and her hair into a plunging cliff-face” (ibid., p. 218). Though many of the monotypes in the exhibition were directly related to Japanese woodblock prints, the present work, with its overt anthropomorphism, belongs to a symbolist and even proto-surreal vocabulary that would inspire, among others, Pavel Tchelitchew’s famous Fata Morgana (see fig. 1).

This important work was once part of the collection of Tadamasa Hayashi, a Japanese art dealer and expert whose collection was filled with landscapes by Impressionist luminaries, and who is one of the first recorded purchasers of a group of Degas’ 1890s landscapes.

As Georges Jeanniot described Degas' process, "his hand grasped the objects, the tools of his genius, handling them with a strange skill and little by little one could see emerging on the metal surface a small valley, a sky…birches and oaks…above the red and green green earth” (quoted in ibid., p. 146).