Edgar Degas Lot n° 25

Edgar Degas Étude de ciel (Rivage et ciel) 1869 Pastel on paper 23,7 x 35,5 cm Framed under glass. Bottom left with the red stamp signature "Degas" (Lugt 658) as well as only faintly recognizable with the oval red stamp "ATELIER ED. DEGAS" (Lugt 657). - Mounted on paper. Lemoisne 224; Michel Schulman, Edgar Degas: Digital Critical Catalogue MS-1350 We thank Michel Schulman, Paris, for his kind information. Provenance Atelier Degas, 4th Vente, no. 49 a; Albert Pra Collection, Paris; Vente Pra, Paris, Hôtel Charpentier, 17 June 1938, lot 13; Galerie Schmit, Paris; Private collection, Switzerland Exhibitions Paris 1975 (Galerie Schmit), Degas, no. 12 ("Etude de ciel"); Paris 2005 (Galerie Schmit), Maîtres Francais des XIXème et XXème siècles, no. 19 ("Rivage et ciel"), each with the gallery label on the reverse Literature Jacques Lassaigne/Fiorella Minervino, Degas, Paris 1974, no. 327 with ills. p. 101 Edgar Degas spent the summer of 1869 in the seaside resorts of Villers-sur-Mer and Etretat on the French Channel coast. Here, under the impression of the sea and the seemingly endless sky, he created a series of landscape pastels - a first for the metropolitan painter. In fact, this atmospheric series remained a singular episode in his oeuvre, as Degas began to suffer from problems with his eyesight while working outdoors. It was in these delicate landscape studies that Degas first discovered for himself the medium of pastels, which was so important to all his subsequent work, and he quickly achieved the highest expressive power in his use of this technique. "In the pastel he had found an adequate means of expression to develop the restrained colourfulness and the linear arabesques of a landscape silhouette in rapidly set colour strokes. [...] When Cézanne recognized in watercolor a medium appropriate to him, Degas, beginning with the Landscape Suite of 1869, made the pastel, along with drawing with pencils, crayons, and charcoal, his central means of representation. He quickly discovered that in this technique, strokes could be combined with painterly density as if it were a matter of course, or that solid materiality could be confronted with delicate transparencies that helped the paper ground to participate. He drew with pencils of varying hardness, while he was able to achieve painterly effects with his fingertips, with soft brushes and wipers." (Götz Adriani, Edgar Degas. Pastels, Oil Sketches, Drawings, exhibition cat. Kunsthalle Tübingen/Nationalgalerie Berlin 1984, Cologne 1986, p. 50). The fleeting natural phenomena of this seascape determined by wind and clouds, in which colors and brightness values are subject to constant change, the artist masterfully captured in the most delicate nuances. He thus follows the English masters of Romanticism, who in the 1820s and 1830s engaged in intensive observations of nature with the phenomena of the sky and clouds. John Constable in particular became famous for his oil studies of cloud formations, to which he devoted himself with great detail and scientific pretension; his contemporary William Turner began around 1810 with watercolor atmospheric observations of the sky, which he increased to dynamic abstractions.