Bateaux de pêche à l’entrée du port de Dives

In 1869, Edgar Degas travelled to the coast of Normandy from Paris. While there, the artist produced approximately forty pastel landscapes of the area between Villiers and Dives-sur-Mer, where the present work was created. In Bateaux de pêche à l’entrée du port de Dives, a solitary boat sails towards the harbour, its sails tilting gracefully in the breeze. The medley of colour is harmonious, with flashes of glacier blue illuminating the sky as peach and pale green define the land beneath.
As Richard Kendall noted, the Normandy seascapes ‘can be counted among the seminal achievements of [Degas’] pre-Impressionist years’ (R. Kendall, Degas Landscapes, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1993, p. 86). That the artist personally inscribed some of these pastels, including the present work, suggests that he, too, thought highly of them as, at this juncture, he rarely inscribed his compositions. Yet despite Degas’ belief in this body of work, his Normandy seascapes have remained relatively unknown and have never been exhibited as a group. Today, several pastels from the group are held in museum collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Bateaux de pêche à l’entrée du port de Dives was included in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s presentation of Manet/Degas in 2023.
By virtue of being landscapes, these maritime compositions have been classified as outliers within Degas’ œuvre. Yet the landscape genre held a consistent position within his practice. Some of his earliest images were landscapes, including more than fifty he made during the three years he spent in Italy on an idiosyncratic and self-guided Grand Tour. He was quite taken with paintings by Camille Corot, as well as those of Eugene Delacroix – whose La mer à Dieppe was exhibited twice in 1864 – and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, but by the time he created Bateaux de pêche à l’entrée du port de Dives, he would have also been aware of more recent canvases by J.M.W. Turner, James McNeill Whistler, and Gustave Courbet, whose seascapes Degas likely saw at the Rond-Pont de Pont d’Alma in 1867. Degas’ early experiments with a nascent form of Impressionism put him in touch with his contemporaries who were also invested in the landscape. Although the subject matter might prove far from what he was seen to have focused upon, Degas, in fact, was in close dialogue with his peers.
Indeed, in the notebooks he filled while in Normandy, as well as various inscriptions he jotted down on the reverse of several pastels, Degas revealed just how attuned he was to the environment: ‘Villers-sur-Mer, sun-set, cold and dull orange-pink, whitish green, neutral, sea like a sardine’s back and clearer than the sky. Line of the seashore brown, the first pools of water reflecting the orange, the second reflecting the upper sky; in front, coffee-coloured sand, rather sombre’ (ibid.,, p. 98). Such reflections demonstrate the care and attention Degas paid to the world around him, and pastel’s delicacy enabled him to respond to atmospheric nuance. He tested various methods of application in an effort to achieve chromatic brilliance. The radiant luminosity of pastel made it the perfect medium for capturing shifts in wind and sunlight, the movement of the sea.
Scholars have debated as to whether Degas executed these pastels en plein air or back in his studio. Several of the sites depicted are clearly identifiable landmarks along the coast and their exacting topography indicates that he was observing his motifs directly. Moreover, some of the works have miniscule pinholes in the top corners, which points to the use of a drawing board or easel. There is no evidence that he used photographs of the coastal expanse. Perhaps most significantly, however, is the cohesion of image and form that these works share, likely due to Degas’ commitment to capturing what he encountered in Normandy. There is a profound unity across the 1869 pastels both in terms of form and image, and together, they reveal a radical vision that advanced a more intense understanding of the natural world.