#degastopicasso

[ashmoleanmuseum]

Edgar Degas (1834–1917)

In 1887 Edgar Degas begun a series of drawings of a woman drying her foot while seated on the edge of a bathtub. This pair, in charcoal and pastel, were both drawn late in that process, sometime between 1900 and 1905. The tub is not drawn in either, making the crouching poses appear slightly awkward.

Evident revisions in the drawing on the left suggest improvisations directly on the paper, and the rough strokes with light vertical lines in the drawing on the right lead to the figure resembling a small sculpture.

You can see both drawings, and more by Degas, in our current Degas to Picasso exhibition, open only until 7 May. Booking is strongly recommended.

[simon-martin]

THE DEGAS & THE SPHINX: for me one of the fascinating things about artworks in museums is not just what they represent and how they fit into wider art history, but the back story of who owned them and how. This Impressionist drawing by Edgar Degas ‘Femme se peignant’ c.1887-90 is one of the stars of ‘Degas to Picasso: International Modern Masters’ which opens at @pallanthousegallery today. It was in private ownership until it came to us in 2016 through the Acceptance in Lieu scheme from the estate of Stephen Brod. It once belonged to the American socialite Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough - the subject of a new biography by @hugovickers entitled ‘The Sphinx’ (after a statue of her at Blenheim Palace, which also has her distinctive eyes painted on the soffit of a portico - see pics here.) She was an art lover and painted by Giovanni Boldini and Sargent, and was friends with the sculptor Rodin, the painter Claude Monet and the novelist Marcel Proust, who confessed to a friend: ‘I never saw a girl with so much beauty, such magnificent intelligence, such goodness and charm.’ We assumed she had bought the drawing in 1918 from the sale of Degas’ collection by the dealer Durand-Ruel. But in fact Hugo recently found a will which revealed it was bequeathed to her in 1927 by her close friend the American lawyer and tennis champion Walter Berry, together with a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Gauguin and $20,000. She had attended the sale with Berry and they were clearly very close (he was also declared by novelist Edith Wharton to be the love of her life). Interestingly the Degas can be seen hanging in a photo of her London home Marlborough House (which features Lytton Strachey and Chips Channon). There’s so much to say about Gladys: that her father shot her mother’s lover, her rivalry with Consuelo Vanderbilt, her botched facelift that left paraffin wax slipping down her face, and her ending up in an asylum - but best to read Hugo’s book! #edgardegas #gladysdeacon #blenheimpalace #hugovickers #degastopicasso @blenheimpalace @claudia_rosencrantz (at Pallant House Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CIaQISfF7tZ/?igshid=1t31taeo38u0l

[ashmoleanmuseum]

Édouard Manet 1832–1883

The Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot was a friend of Édouard Manet and later married his brother Eugène. This lithograph print, on display in our Degas to Picasso exhibition, demonstrates Manet’s approach to reproducing what he actually saw, as opposed to what he knew.

Morisot’s face is not carefully modelled with meticulous shading, as if lit in a studio which was the Academy’s way of drawing. The portrait is, instead, made up of flat areas of light and shadow in an attempt to reproduce the experience of seeing a face in daylight.

Manet died on this day in 1883 in Paris.

The Degas to Picasso exhibition closes next Sunday 7 May. We are open this coming Bank Holiday Monday and stay open late on Friday 5 and Saturday 6 May. Booking is now strongly recommended.

[ashmoleanmuseum]

Van Gogh’s first and only etching

This was the only etching ever made by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh: Portrait of Doctor Gachet (The Man with the Pipe), 1890. You can see it on display in our Degas to Picasso exhibition until 7 May.

A doctor specialising in mental illnesses, Gachet was recommended to Van Gogh by fellow artist Camille Pissarro early in 1890. The doctor was also an amateur artist and the two men became close friends.

Gachet handed Van Gogh an etching needle and copper plate one afternoon. Van Gogh had never etched before and had no experience of etching techniques, but was nonetheless delighted with the results and planned to make more. Van Gogh sadly died around a month later, before he had time to begin work on them.

Van Gogh was born on this day in 1853.

[ashmoleanmuseum]

Charles Robert Cockerell

Ashmolean architect Charles Robert Cockerell was born on this day in 1788. His grand neoclassical design was constructed between 1841 and 1845.

What do you think he would have made of the Degas to Picasso exhibition banners adorning it at the moment?

It was the Classical architecture that surrounded Cockerell during his Grand Tour trip to Italy, Greece and Turkey that influenced his future work. When he returned to England in 1817, Cockerell started working in London, specialising in the Greek revival style. Cockerell was the first ever winner of the prestigeous award, The Royal Gold Medal, which was established by the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1848 and is still awarded and celebrated today. Even after his death in 1863 he was considered a great architect, being buried alongside Christopher Wren and his father-in-law John Rennie in St Paul's Cathedral, London.

Below is an 1817 portrait of Charles Robert Cockerell by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

[ashmoleanmuseum]

Mother and Child Fernand Léger, 1949

This gouache painting is on display in the final room of our current Degas to Picasso exhibition. The bold image shows Léger’s ambition to create humane and uncomplicated art. The pair face the viewer and resemble a secular Madonna and Child, the boy holding a flowering branch like a saintly symbol, and image representing the desire for a peaceful world in the same way Picasso used a dove in the same year.

From 1918 onwards the human figure became a major element in Léger’s art. He took traditional subjects and drew and painted them with a new simplicity. Whereas Cubism had originally fragmented the human figure to the point of dissolution, Léger now used simplified forms, along with the tubular shapes that he had introduced into his earliest Cubist works, to make his subjects recognisable.

Image © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016

[ashmoleanmuseum]

Happy International Women’s Day! 

To celebrate we’ll be sharing, throughout the day, a number of artworks by women in the Ashmolean’s collections. 

Queen Nefertari and the goddess Isis A copy by Nina de Garis Davis (1881–1965) of the painting in the tomb of Queen Nefertari, Western Thebes, about 1230 BC

Nina trained at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art in London, and later began a career copying Egyptian tomb paintings, particularly in the region of Thebes. 

By using egg tempera instead of the usual watercolour paint used by other copyists, she achieved an effect that faithfully echoes the colouring and texture of the original paintings.

Click here to buy this image as a print or canvas.

[ashmoleanmuseum]

Roger de La Fresnaye 

This watercolour composition by French cubist painter Roger de La Fresnaye (1885–1925) can be seen in our current Degas to Picasso exhibition until 7 May. 

Painted around 1917 it depicts representations of two figures. On the left a soldier with a drum at his waist looks down at a rectangle (possibly a sheet of music) in his left hand, and the figure on the right is playing the trumpet. La Fresnaye’s work during this period belongs to the bolder, more colourful phase of Cubism known as ‘synthetic’, in which forms are flattened out as if stuck to the surface of the image and almost all sense of three-dimensional space is eradicated. 

La Fresnaye was a member of the Section d'Or, a collective of painters, sculptors, poets and critics associated with Cubism and based in the Parisian suburbs.