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Lot Essay
This dashing half-length portrait by Edgar Degas depicts his friend and fellow artist Léon-Joseph-Florentin Bonnat. In stark chiaroscuro, the exceptionally rendered head is set against a flurry of rich, textured strokes of white, which conjure the sitter’s body with bravura and assuredness. Amplifying the contemplative inwardness of his expression, Bonnat’s visage materializes from the dramatic obscurity of shadow, offset by a radiant and soft, orange light. The portrait is set against a romantic, expressive background, which shimmers aura-like in hues of blue, red and green.
Executed early in Degas’s career, the present work demonstrates the evolution of the artist’s approach to figuration. By the mid-1860s, Degas’s technical style, formed initially by teachers, who themselves were disciples of Ingres, and refined by prolonged study of Renaissance art, was still sufficiently precise that he had to struggle to attain the degree of tenebrous ambiguity that would eventually become his hallmark. Yet, if here we can trace the sure modelling of the face and body to the classical line of Ingres and other Old Master’s, the background speaks of Delacroix’s Romantic handling of colour —a synthesis of approaches which were previously regarded as irreconcilable opposites. Degas’s portrait of Léon Bonnat exemplifies the truism that genuine innovators do not destroy the learnings of the past, but build upon them.
Placing strong emphasis on the visages and deportments of their sitters, the portraits from this early period testify to a close, even intimate, relationship between the artist and the characters he depicts. In the present work, the sitter exudes a bold and confident personality, in stark contrast to the much stiffer portrait Degas painted of Bonnat, now in the collection of Musée Bonnat-Helleu. As Jean Sutherland Boggs wrote about the two portraits: ‘[in the present work] Bonnat is not the elegant young bourgeois of the Bayonne picture, in whom Degas saw the air of a “Venetian ambassador”, but an artist at work. The emaciated face with jet-black beard and hair and the dark eyes that disappear in their sockets give him an arresting expression, dramatic and troubled.’
Bonnat was born in Bayonne in 1833 and living for many years in Madrid, where his father owned a bookshop, and rose to prominence as a celebrated portraitist of the Third Republic, winning a number of state-sponsored commissions, the most important of which was the cycle of paintings that now adorn the interior of the Panthéon in Paris. Like William Bouguereau, who was Bonnat’s contemporary and reputed rival, the artist was ultimately elected to the Académie and became a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts. Among his students were Raoul Dufy, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (for whom the older artist reputedly did not care). In 1905, Bonnat would eventually become director of the École des Beaux-Arts.
Degas kept this painting for his entire life and it was bought by the great collector Georges Viau at his estate sale in 1918. It has been included in a number of seminal exhibitions and has remained with the present owner’s family for more than 50 years.
Executed early in Degas’s career, the present work demonstrates the evolution of the artist’s approach to figuration. By the mid-1860s, Degas’s technical style, formed initially by teachers, who themselves were disciples of Ingres, and refined by prolonged study of Renaissance art, was still sufficiently precise that he had to struggle to attain the degree of tenebrous ambiguity that would eventually become his hallmark. Yet, if here we can trace the sure modelling of the face and body to the classical line of Ingres and other Old Master’s, the background speaks of Delacroix’s Romantic handling of colour —a synthesis of approaches which were previously regarded as irreconcilable opposites. Degas’s portrait of Léon Bonnat exemplifies the truism that genuine innovators do not destroy the learnings of the past, but build upon them.
Placing strong emphasis on the visages and deportments of their sitters, the portraits from this early period testify to a close, even intimate, relationship between the artist and the characters he depicts. In the present work, the sitter exudes a bold and confident personality, in stark contrast to the much stiffer portrait Degas painted of Bonnat, now in the collection of Musée Bonnat-Helleu. As Jean Sutherland Boggs wrote about the two portraits: ‘[in the present work] Bonnat is not the elegant young bourgeois of the Bayonne picture, in whom Degas saw the air of a “Venetian ambassador”, but an artist at work. The emaciated face with jet-black beard and hair and the dark eyes that disappear in their sockets give him an arresting expression, dramatic and troubled.’
Bonnat was born in Bayonne in 1833 and living for many years in Madrid, where his father owned a bookshop, and rose to prominence as a celebrated portraitist of the Third Republic, winning a number of state-sponsored commissions, the most important of which was the cycle of paintings that now adorn the interior of the Panthéon in Paris. Like William Bouguereau, who was Bonnat’s contemporary and reputed rival, the artist was ultimately elected to the Académie and became a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts. Among his students were Raoul Dufy, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (for whom the older artist reputedly did not care). In 1905, Bonnat would eventually become director of the École des Beaux-Arts.
Degas kept this painting for his entire life and it was bought by the great collector Georges Viau at his estate sale in 1918. It has been included in a number of seminal exhibitions and has remained with the present owner’s family for more than 50 years.