Degas, Renoir, Morisot and Cassatt

Not all the Impressionists painted landscapes. Paris was being rebuilt with wide boulevards, cafés, theaters, parks and railway stations, and several painters made this modern city life their subject.

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas, The Dance Class, 1874. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Describe. In a rehearsal room of the Paris Opéra, young dancers in white tutus stretch, wait, scratch and fix their sashes while one performs for the old ballet master, Jules Perrot, who leans on his stick. Analyze. The floorboards rush back in a steep diagonal; the view is from slightly above, off-center, as if we had just walked in. Figures are cut off at the edge, as in a snapshot or a Japanese print. Interpret. It is not a performance but the work behind it: tiredness, boredom and discipline. Edgar Degas (1834 to 1917) painted it in the studio, from drawings and memory, building the scene with great care.

Key idea

Edgar Degas painted dancers and racehorses, Pierre-Auguste Renoir crowds at leisure, and Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt the lives of women and children.

Common mistake

People think Degas painted outdoors like Monet. He worked mostly in the studio, from drawings, memory and sometimes photographs, and he disliked being called an Impressionist; he preferred to be called a Realist or an "Independent." He still showed in the Impressionist exhibitions and shared their interest in modern life and unusual viewpoints.

Why it works

Paris itself had changed. Between the 1850s and 1870s Baron Haussmann's rebuilding cut wide new boulevards through the old city, and railways, cafés, theaters and riverside resorts gave people new ways to spend free time. Painters who wanted to be "of their time" found their subjects in these new spaces and in the people who used them.

Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880 to 1881. The Phillips Collection, Washington.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 to 1919) painted his friends relaxing on the balcony of the Maison Fournaise, a restaurant beside the Seine at Chatou, after a day of boating. Light filters through the striped awning onto straw hats, glasses and fruit. The figures, real people from Renoir's circle, talk, flirt and lean on the railing. It is a picture of modern leisure, warm, crowded and happy.

Morisot and Cassatt

Berthe Morisot, The Cradle, 1872. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Women painters could not go everywhere men could: not into cafés alone at night or backstage at the Opéra. Berthe Morisot (1841 to 1895), a founding member who showed at the first exhibition in 1874, painted the private spaces she knew. In The Cradle her sister Edma watches her sleeping baby through a veil of white muslin; a diagonal links the mother's gaze to the child. The American Mary Cassatt (1844 to 1926), who settled in Paris in 1874 and joined the group at Degas's invitation in 1877, painted women and children with the same frankness. In Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878) a bored child sprawls in an overstuffed chair. Degas, Cassatt wrote, helped her with the background.

Mary Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878. National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Worked example: Studio or outdoors?

A Degas painting shows a horse race with jockeys cut off at the edges and a steep, high viewpoint. Was it painted on the spot, like a Monet landscape?

Degas worked mostly in the studio from drawings and memory.
The cropped, snapshot-like composition was carefully designed.
So it was composed in the studio, not painted outdoors on the spot.

Answer: Most likely composed in the studio.

Degas, Renoir, Morisot and Cassatt

Edgar Degas

Renoir

Morisot and Cassatt

Practice

Builds on

Leads to

Sources and further reading