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EDGAR DEGAS

Portrait of Mademoiselle Helene Rouart/Portrait de
Mademoiselle Helene Rouart (1886)
Oil on putty-color primed canvas
161cm X 120 cm / 63 1/2 in X 47in

During the 1880s Degas' failing eyesight was giving him serious difficulties with his work in general, and with oil painting in particular. This large portrait of Helene Rouart was one of the last major works in oil attempted by the artist, and his final statement on the theme of the sitter in a characteristic environ-ment, which had preoccupied Degas since the Bellelli family portrait of 1859-1860. Degas had had problems with his eyesight since the early 1870s, and in part as a result of this. he gradually turned to media like pastel, which offered a more direct method of coloring. With oil painting, the artist mixed colors on the palette more than on the support itself, and this extra stage was eliminated by working with pastel, in which the colors are applied and mixed directly on the support.

Degas' friendship with Helene Rouart's father, Henri Rouart, began in 1870. Rouart was a successful and wealthy industrial engin-eer, who took up landscape painting and also amassed an impressive art collection, which included Egyptian artefacts. Old Masters and modern painting from works by Corot and Millet to the Impressionists themselves. He owned many works by Degas, whose portrait of his daughter was part of a grander project to portray the entire family, a project curtailed by the death of Mme. Rouart. Henri Rouart was encouraged by Degas to show his work, and apart from regularly lending Impressionist paintings from his collection for exhibition, he also exhibited his own work at almost all the eight Impressionist group shows between 1874 and 1886.

The works from Rouart's collection which surround Helene's figure in this portrait have been identified. The glass case to the left con-tains three wooden Egyptian statues, the near-est a funerary figurine. On the wall behind her are, at the top, part of a Chinese silk hanging, and to the right a view of Naples painted by Corot in 1828, possibly included as an allusion to Degas' own familial attachment to that port. Below the Corot is a black crayon drawing of a peasant woman by Millet. Rouart also owned several important pastels by Millet, which may have influenced Degas' development of the medium, late in his life.

Helene Rouart is thus presented not in an environment which complements or clarifies her own individual character, but one which tells the viewer about her social role as her father's daughter. Indicative of the cloistered, chaperoned life led by most middle- and upper-class unmarried women in this period, this portrayal of Helene Rouart shows her trapped among her father's belongings, like another of his possessions. The taut precision of Degas' composition, and the shallow, claustrophobic pictorial space aptly convey this.

Degas has placed Helene Rouart immediately behind the symbol of her absent father, his huge study chair, which dwarfs her physical presence. To her right, she is hemmed in by the free-standing glass case which houses her father's Egyptian statues, the nearest of which - ironically the funerary figurine - echoes her own pose. its head level with hers. This visual pun was perhaps a humorous reference on Degas' part to the stiff formality often imposed on women of her class, by the restraints and expectations of society. However, Degas was not renowned for his sympathy towards wo-men. To her left, she is crowded by the pictures hung on the wall. and their distance from her is made ambiguous to stress the airless feel of the home environment that closes around her. Above, the dark reds of the wall hanging push down and. linking with the same reds of the chair back, squeeze her between them. The blue border at her head level creates a striking horizontal which equates visually with the upper framing edge of the picture, which brings it and the red hanging up toward the picture surface, further diminishing the pictorial space. The blue border meets the frame of the Corot at right-angles, just behind her head, a device which anchors her, tightly immobilized within the composition. Helene Rouart is completely enclosed in the rigid network of interlocking geometrical shapes and planes that surround her seated figure.

By the time this work waspainted, Degas'eye-sight was becoming poor and his field of vision restricted. This disabiRtymay account for the loosely finished state of the picture. However, the artist had lost none of his powers of acute psychological perception and the work lacks nothing in its surety of touch or compositional precision. As ever. Degas was concerned to portray his sitter's persona in its subtlest nuances. Here Degas shows the contradictions faced by middle-class women in late nineteenth century French society. The geometrical grid in which Helene Rouart is trapped in this composition aptly echoes the formal claustrophobia of her Ufestyle. The color range, with it muted, broken hues, reinforces the mood of the picture. This canvas is not a standard format.

In addition to the chair, the foreground is blocked and dominated by a table piled up with her father's papers, which are a further refer-ence to the implied weighty presence of her father in the painting. The three-dimensional glass structure of the display case could have been used by Degas to open and define a sense of space around his sitter. Instead, its receding metal frame is barely distinguishable , and the front square edge dominates in its flattening reiteration of the picture edge . Whether or not the portrait was intentionally left incomplete, is not known. In its present state it certainly lacks neither power nor impact, despite idiosyncracies like the hidden or missing little finger of Helene Rouart's right hand.

Painted on a large standard format, portrait 100 canvas, this work has a quality . Overall, its tone is subdued , the colors mostly broken in mixtures , and earth colors are used. Like in Gauguin's works later many of which were influenced by Degas, dull harmonies unite the painting and no strong lights or darks disrupt the middle tone which predominates throughout. A light Indian red earth was used to ouline the paler forms and general structure of the composition, over a putty-colored commercial preparation which blends perfectly with tonal and color scheme. For other areas , a darker color , possibly Prussian blue, was used to indicate contours. On the figure, raw umber outlines alternate or are overlaid with dark blue ones. On the hands the two colors are mingled wet in wet . The first ebauche layer on the figure was applied in thinly scumbled dilute Indian red , which was left to show through the uneven semi-opaque blue layer on top. The blue is thinnest over her corseted breasts , so the red underlay aids the sense of swelling form. Where the brick red is exposed among the blues it appears, by contrast, to have the brilliance of vermillion . This is typical of the exaggerated brightening of a color which can be achieved either by warm-cool complementary contrast , or by juxtaposing lighter colors, the orange-red , against darker ones , the blue. The insistent use of these two dominant colors in the picture , the warm brick red and the steely blue , which appear repeatedly in modified tints, provide the rich harmony which unifies the composition.

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