Recording Figures and Movement   Image: The Dance Class, Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas   Pierre Auguste Renoir

Edgar Degas kept an aristocratic distance. His early work was on conventional lines: large history paintings, designed for submission to the Salons, and portraits in the manner of Ingres, whom he admired greatly. In these portraits, however, the world in which the sitter lived gradually assumed more and more importance. From painting singers and musicians in the orchestra pit it was only a short step to painting dancers on the stage and in rehearsal. Degas became obsessed with the movement of figures, with catching in paint or crayon the particular movement of figures that seems to imply both the beginning and the end of a gesture. With the same singleness of purpose that Monet showed, he restricted his subject matter to the women who were his models, depicting them in an ever more narrow range of gestures: washing, stepping from a tub, drying themselves with a towel, combing and brushing their hair. With complete objectivity and lack of emotion or any kind of personal feeling, Degas observed. Although his detachment lent a coldness to his work, few painters can rival him in the representation of the human body. Renoir's late work was also centered upon the human figure, but his ample and sensuous nudes express a positive feeling for life very different from the aloof view of Degas. Both painters turned to sculpture as the natural extension of their pictorial interests. It is a singular fact, reflecting on the generally poor level of this art at the time, that, with the exception of Rodin and Rosso, the best sculpture of the 19th century was produced by painters. Renoir and all his contemporaries had passed through an artistic crisis in the 1880's, at the very moment when public recognition and financial success were coming to them. The reason for this crisis was simple: Impressionism marked the culmination of naturalistic painting. Nobody has ever succeeded in giving a more convincing representation of a landscape than Monet. A moment of perfection in the history of art had been reached. It was also a dead end.

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