# The Arts/Volume 1/Issue 1/Edgar Degas, Painter-Graver

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​ LOGES D'ACTRICES
EDGAR DEGAS, PAINTER-GRAVER
By the Editor
WHEN, in 1894, I went to Paris to study art the first meal I took in the city was at the home of a cousin in the Avenue de Villiers. As I came into the living-room I was struck by a landscape with jockeys and horses and a flag-pole which cut the picture vertically into two sections. The years have gone by but the impression I then received has remained and that landscape by Degas has been one of the strongest influences in my art-life.
Ten days ago I dropped into Keppel's and there David Keppel showed me a number of etchings and lithographs by Degas, most of them works with which I was not familiar. The impression they made was so great, that again I felt myself a boy in Paris, again I felt the overpowering beauty of that landscape in my cousin's living-room.
Edgar Degas evidently felt that his etchings had little commercial value for very few prints were made from any of his plates. He felt that as works of art they had considerable value for he treasured the prints and, at his death, the series, with specimens of the various states, was almost complete. He took ​ AUX AMBASSADEURS: MLLE. BECAT up engraving in his youth, made a number of portraits of himself, various members of his family, his friends, all leading up to the beautiful etchings of Manet made in 1864. Then, when he could justly consider himself a master of the craft, he dropped etching. For ten years he devoted himself to painting but, about 1875, he again began to etch and to make lithographs, feverishly for a short time. About 1890 he definitely gave up all kinds of engraving. About 1890 too, Degas, a man in the fifties (he was born in 1834) abandoned his experiments in the field of art. He began to repeat motives he had already ​ CHANTEUSE DE CAFÉ-CONCERT ​used. His art ceased to have the almost infinite variety of his earlier work, he showed signs of age. The engravings of Degas were made in two periods, during his youth and again during the epoch which marks for us the complete fruition of his art. None of them were made after the decline in his work begins to be manifest.
AU LOUVRE: LA PEINTURE
The two etchings and the two lithographs which I have chosen to reproduce figure in the exhibition of "Modern Prints" being held at Keppel's. They were made about 1875 and therefore represent Degas at the very height of his power. The etching "Loges d'Actrices" is Number 28 in the catalogue made by Loys Delteil. "Au Louvre: La Peinture" (Delteil, Number 29), introduces a portrait of Mary Cassatt. The two lithographs are "Aux Ambassadeurs: Mlle. Becat," and "Chanteuse de Café Concert."
All are from Degas' collection, only known to his intimate friends until exhibited in Paris after his death. That exhibition revealed to the world what a worker Degas had been. There were drawings he had made in his youth, facsimiles of drawings by Leonardo and others. They are amazing in accuracy and beauty. Degas showed in them his masterly knowledge of form and his infinite capacity for taking pains. The etching "Au Louvre: La Peinture" went through twenty states, after which Degas, dissatisfied, re-arranged the figures on another plate.
Degas not only mastered etching and lithography but he practised with ease dry-point, soft-ground etching and aquatint, using each with a skill which would amaze us did we not already know what a versatile master Degas was.
He was a master and his etchings and lithographs will live beside his drawings, pastels and paintings.