, it is reminicent of Titian’s portraits to mind. Its professional quality and Degas’ ease in handling the idiom of classical painting makes it possible to compare it to portraits by Ingres. This canvas foretells a future for the painter as a great portraitist. And he indeed became a remarkable portraitist. During the 1850s Degas began to paint the portraits of members of the Bellelli family, that of his father’s sister, who had married Baron Bellelli. He did composition studies, sketched the baron and his wife, painted his own cousins Giulia and Giovannini, and studied the hands of his subjects. The result was a large painting – 200 by 253 centemetres, and painted in Paris,
The Bellelli Family, that recalls the portraits of Hans Holbein, Jean Clouet, or Diego Velázquez. But the sky-blue wallpaper with small white flowers lightens the colour scheme, and gives the painting the cozy, intimate feel of a life of ease. The classical balance of the composition is broken, completely unexpectedly by a single detail: the master of the house, seated with his back to the viewer, turns so spontaneously and with such liveliness towards his wife that, in an instant, the impression of models in the act of posing vanishes. With his solid training in classical principles, the painter is beginning to turn, little by little, towards the modern life which will soon absorb him completely.
Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet “La Source” (detail), 1866–1868.
Oil on canvas, 110.5 × 91.4 cm.
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
Woman Ironing, c. 1869.
Oil on canvas, 92.5 × 73.5 cm.
Neue Pinakothek, Munich.
The enormous painting The Daughter of Jephthah is full of the influences of different masters, from Nicolas Poussin to Raphael, and Eugène Delacroix. The painting Scene of War from the Middle Ages or The Misfortunes of the City of Orléans, with its baffling subject, could have been drawn from a tale that Degas’ grandfather, who was originally from Orléans, had told him. It reminds one of Delacroix. As early as the 1850s he discovered two absolutely new and unexpected subjects: horses and the ballet. In 1859, the Valpinçon family invited Edgar to spend a few weeks at their estate in Ménil-Hubert-sur-Orne where they had a horse-breeding farm. His eye noted their proportions, the particularities of the horse’s skeleton, and the play of its muscles. After his first rather complex compositions depicting racetracks, Degas learned the art of translating the nobility and elegance of horses, their nervous movements, and the formal beauty of their musculature
