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EDGAR DEGAS
Portrait of Duranty/Portrait de Duranty
Distemper and pastel on sized but unprimed canvas
100cm X l00cm/391/2in x 391/2in

Cool, aloof, intellectual. Degas was the epitome of the Parisian dandy. Abandoning historically inspired academic subjects early in the 1860s, he began a lifelong commitment to rendering the modern life subjects which he saw around him. Influenced by an eclectic appreciation of the art of the Old Masters, and by the great nineteenth century painters, especially Ingres and Delacroix, Degas fused in his art the grand traditions of draftsmanship and coloring. He combined tradition and in-novation. He wanted to bring a new emotional subtlety to painting, to rid art of the schema-tized caricatures of the emotions to which academic artists resorted. His aims were sum-marized by his friend Edmond Duranty in 18 76:
'by means of a back, we want a temperament, an age, a social condition to be revealed.'

Degas met Duranty around 1865, and estab-lished a close friendship with this kindred spirit. Duranty had been a staunch supporter of Realism for more than a decade, and had edited a shortlived review Le Realisme in the mid 1850s. An art critic and novelist in the vein of Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) and Emile Zola (1840-1902), his fame was eclipsed by the success of these writers, leaving him an ironic cynicism akin to that of Degas himself. Duranty was the only writer in his social circle whom Degas portrayed, and he appeared in works other than this portrait.

The Portrait of Duranty comes toward the start of the period between 1875 and 1885 which saw Degas' most prolific experiments in artistic techniques. Around this time, artists were increasingly exploiting the matness of modern paints, and here Degas used a com-bination of opaque non-oil-based mediums. Distemper - a water-based glue-bound medium - provided the basic material of the portrait, which was executed on unprimed canvas. A shine apparent only in areas where the raw canvas is revealed, suggests that the fabric was first sized, with a glue size. The combination of distemper overworked with pastel used here has adhered inadequately to the flexible fabric support, and paint losses are clearly visible in places. The palish beige linen color of the canvas was also intentionally left bare in many parts, and its warmth unifies the overall tonality which, because of subdued canvas tone, results in muted harmony.

The mediums - distemper and pastel - are both mat and opaque, scattering reflected light from the picture surface. The pastel, with its distinct powdery hatched marks, is clearly visible worked over the freely brushed dis-temper colors. The pastel was used selectively, especially on the figure of Duranty, where it focuses attention on the sitter by strengthening drawing and heightening color. Strokes of a startling violet-blue, used to express reflected light in the shadow, for example on the raised middle finger supporting the sitter's head, have an almost floating, luminous quality. A darker, greener blue pastel was worked into the blue of the jacket, and some black strokes add lines of definition to the form of the figure. Pastel hatch-ing on the face constructs form in terms of modeled color and tone, but, because their direction does not always follow the form, these marks have a life of their own. They con-tradict the formal structure of the face - even at a relatively distant viewing range - and this results in a striking tension between illusion and surface pattern.

Compositionally, the picture is powerful, and typical of Degas' daring experiments with pic-torial construction and space. Influenced by Japanese prints and photography, he sought to express 'the particular note of the modern individual, in his clothing, in the midst of his social habits', as Duranty stated in 1876. Adopting an unusual square format which stresses surface flatness. Degas placed the sitter's head centrally, the midpoint of the canvas coinciding with Duranty's raised fingers pressing against his skull. This was perhaps a humorous reference to the man's intellectual intensity, as well as a typical pose. The figure, thus placed, seems oppressed by the mass of roughly indicated books on the shelves im-mediately behind him. He appears trapped in a shallow space, completely surrounded by the evidence of his trade, which, in the abrupt slope of his crowded desk, effectively separates him from the spectator - whose gaze he avoids.

Degas' alignment of the bookshelves is also no accident. The second shelf down on the left links with the third down on the right, and to-gether they form a disturbing horizontal which cuts across the picture space, denying recession, and pushing close up to the picture surface.
Colors, like the bright blue and the brown beneath it in the foreground left, serve a similar function, linking with comparable colors in the background to flatten the pictorial space.
The overall effect of such devices is to empha-size the disquieting tension between abstract design and illusionistic representation, which gives a taut sense of presence and immediacy to the sitter.

Unlike the Impressionists, with whom Degas was associated by friendship and a commitment to alternative, unofficial exhibitions, Degas did not work from nature: 'art is not a sport' he maintained. He always worked in the studio. often from memory and from reworking ideas within his own pictures, preferring the effects of artificial light to outdoor lighting. For him, art was 'falsehood', a picture was 'something which calls for as much cunning, trickery and vice as the perpetration of a crime.' Yet to the casual observer, the final effect was often one of guileless and almost casual immediacy. This result, achieved sensitively in this portrait, is characteristic of many of Degas' works.

Like many of his more daring contemporaries, Degas began to experiment with square format canvases during the 1870s. Itis likely that his avid experiments with work on paper supports, which were easily cut, altered and added to as need demanded, fed his ideas, permitting him to develop them with great confidence onto the more costly canvas supports. Although Degas only infrequently used oil on unprimed canvas, because it was technically unsound, water-based paints were safe to use with raw canvas. In fact, the dull gloss visible on the unpointed parts of this picture suggests that Degas didgivehis support limited protection by applying a layer of size glue. At that time canvases could then be bought ready sized, but without a layer of ground color, and Degas may well have used such a product here. fust as Degas was experimenting with fairly binder-free oil colors, applied with turpentine to give dusty, mat effects, so too he used naturally mat media. Here gouache and pastel- themattest of an media-were combined to give a pale, light-reflective surface.

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