What It Feels Like

Peter Campbell

  • Degas beyond Impressionism
    August 1996
  • Degas beyond Impressionism by Richard Kendall
    National Gallery, 324 pp, £35.00, May 1996, ISBN 1 85709 129 9
  • Degas as Collector
    National Gallery, August 1996, ISBN 0 00 000097 3

Degas beyond Impressionism at the National Gallery shows an old man’s work. His eyesight was giving him trouble. His subject-matter had narrowed down to a few themes: women – standing, stretching, washing, drying themselves or brushing their hair; dancers – resting, putting on a shoe, standing in the wings or grouped on the stage. Subjects from modern life, which had characterised his early work, are missing: no jockeys, few portraits, no brothels, no street and café scenes, no music-hall singers. Landscapes, more of them than you might expect from a painter who was so scornful of the genre (and some of them in curiously lurid before-the-storm-colours), share the simplified outlines and generalised forms which distinguish the pictures of women.

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[*] Nineteenth-Century French Drawing from the British Museum, at the British Museum until 15 September.