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An odalisque is a woman slave in a harem. I find her short hair appealing, but look at how realistic his treatment of her feet is. Well, his treatment of the other parts are just as realistic, I guess ...
I just liked his treatment of a gray sky.
Curious expressions on the faces of the women, n'est pas? The standing woman seems to regard the seated woman with the same expression the seated woman regards ... what? Strangely, this almost seems to be photographic quality. Isn't art great? This does not seem to be one of those crowded beaches.
From the 1880s, Dagnan-Bouveret along with Gustave Courtois, maintained a studio in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a fashionable suburb of Paris. By that time he was recognized as a leading modern artist known for his peasant scenes, but also for his mystical-religious compositions. His style was the opposite of the Impressionists. I wish I were a younger man, I would find a girlfriend from Brittany and see if I could get her to dress up in native costume!
Unlike most painters of the mid-19th century, Camille Corot almost never exhibited his figure paintings, instead showing history paintings and poetic landscapes. Interrupted Reading was a private picture, for which Corot posed his model wearing one of the Italianate costumes he had acquired from his trips to Italy. Absorbed in thoughts inspired by the book she has put down, the model is also perfectly self-contained, with the curve of her posture and upraised arm emphasizing her introspection and private thoughts.
What I don't get is how long can a model "hold" a unique expression so the artist can capture it?
I am re-titling this: I do what now and get my picture painted?
This canvas is Edgar Degas's most ambitious statement on the theme of the millinery shop. Although the young woman is presumably a hatmaker examining her handiwork with her lips pursed, perhaps around a pin, it has also been suggested that she could be a client about to try on a hat, since she wears an expensive fur rimmed dress and kid gloves. X-ray examination revealed that this figure originally represented a customer, but in his rethinking of the subject, Degas withheld the information necessary to determine her identity.
Edgar Degas first painted dancers as an independent subject in 1871. He was to devote almost half his output as an artist to this subject, observing countless performances and rehearsals at the Paris Opera. Here he placed the viewer in the wings, as if among the elite Opera subscribers who roamed and socialized backstage. Degas, who believed that "the artist must live alone, and his private life must remain unknown",lived an outwardly uneventful life. In company he was known for his wit, which could often be cruel. He was characterized as an "old curmudgeon" by the novelist George Moore, and he deliberately cultivated his reputation as a misanthropic bachelor.
It's hard to explain why I find this picture appealing. One kind of discovers the woman in white, her presence is not apparent right away. The Impressionist treatment makes her blend into the background. Why is she on this hillside? Beyond her, there seem to be other open parasols. She must be on a path, and part of a group on a nature outing. She seems to be lagging behind for a reason. See if you can catch up to her and put your arm around her waist and smile at her.
Let it out, songbird. For all the stylistic evolution, certain features of Degas's work remained the same throughout his life. He always painted indoors, preferring to work in his studio, either from memory or using models. The figure remained his primary subject; his few landscapes were produced from memory or imagination. It was not unusual for him to repeat a subject many times, varying the composition or treatment. He was a deliberative artist whose works, as Andrew Forge has written, "were prepared, calculated, practiced, developed in stages. They were made up of parts. The adjustment of each part to the whole, their linear arrangement, was the occasion for infinite reflection and experiment." Degas himself explained, "In art, nothing should look like chance, not even movement".
To study and convey movement was a chosen task, first undertaken on the race course and then in his many pictures of the Opera, viewed from behind the scenes, in the wings, or from the orchestra stalls during a performance. There is another picture of this title by Degas in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, as far as I can tell. So I may be confused.
Degas' mature style is distinguished by conspicuously unfinished passages, even in otherwise tightly rendered paintings. He frequently blamed his eye troubles for his inability to finish, an explanation that met with some skepticism from colleagues and collectors who reasoned, as Stuckey explains, that "his pictures could hardly have been executed by anyone with inadequate vision." The artist provided another clue when he described his predilection "to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them,"and was in any case notoriously reluctant to consider a painting complete.
As his financial situation improved through sales of his own work, he was able to indulge his passion for collecting works by artists he admired: old masters such as El Greco and such contemporaries as Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Three artists he idolized, Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier, were especially well represented in his collection. In the late 1880s, Degas also developed a passion for photography. He photographed many of his friends, often by lamplight, as in his double portrait of Renoir and Mallarmê. Other photographs, depicting dancers and nudes, were used for reference in some of Degas' drawings and paintings.
As the years passed, Degas became isolated, due in part to his belief that a painter could have no personal life. The Dreyfus Affair controversy brought his anti-Semitic leanings to the fore and he broke with all his Jewish friends. His argumentative nature was deplored by Renoir, who said of him: "What a creature he was, that Degas! All his friends had to leave him; I was one of the last to go, but even I couldn't stay till the end." Although he is known to have been working in pastel as late as the end of 1907, and is believed to have continued making sculpture as late as 1910, he apparently ceased working in 1912, when the impending demolition of his longtime residence on the rue Victor Massé forced a wrenching move to quarters on the boulevard de Clichy. He never married and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, restlessly wandering the streets of Paris before dying in 1917.
This image is typical in Degas's reoccurring theme: that "the stage is at all times artificially lit and our distance from it makes the colors become both loud and blurred, creating an impression of distance and glamorous dazzle." Degas doesn't give personality or expression to the faces of the dancers. To him, they are only and image prancing on the stage, they are their to entertain. He outlines the form and beauty of the dancers of the Paris Opera House. Because of that, the freedom of his brushwork is not tied down by detail, but he expresses only the glamour at the ballet.
I can scarcely believe that this painting is based on an actual scene. I love how low the wire sinks under her weight. No one seems afraid that they will have to catch her if or avoid her as she falls!