art-Degas.com
Edgar Degas 1834-1917
Edgar Degas - Six Friends of the Artist 1885
 Six Friends of the Artist |
From Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art:
This large group portrait represents six friends at Dieppe on the Normandy coast. From front to back they are the sophisticated Parisian Albert Boulanger-Cavé, painters Henri Gervex and Jacques-Émile Blanche, writers Daniel Halévy and his father Ludovic, and the English painter Walter Sickert. The drawing evokes the performance of a tableau, for which Degas handpicked the cast from two vacationing families and their guests. Adopting a narrow, elevated viewpoint, Degas drastically foreshortened the composition and placed the figures in an ambiguous space, which allows them to be perceived at once from several angles. The complementary blue-and-orange color scheme and dense pastel marks create a lively surface and light suggestive of the late summer sun.