ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

“What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters,” stated the French artist Edgar Degas (1834–1917) late in life. Among those he studied most closely was the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669).

By examining Rembrandt’s work—and his prints in particular—Degas discovered an approach to portraiture and self-portraiture that emphasized the expressive and technical potential of the form, an approach that was not encouraged in Degas’s traditional early training. After enrolling briefly at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he soon began to turn away from standard academic models that emphasized clarity and line.

In 1856 Degas embarked on a three-year trip to Italy to study classical sculpture and Renaissance painting. While in Italy, he saw a number of prints by Rembrandt in Italian collections and copied several in his drawings and sketch books, developing one of them into his own etching after Rembrandt.

Inspired by the Dutch artist’s example, Degas made a series of self-portraits that explored a range of tonal effects, from subtle shading to dramatic contrasts of light and dark, just as Rembrandt had done as a young artist in Leiden and Amsterdam. This series of some forty paintings, prints, and drawings dates to Degas’s early years, between about 1854 and 1862, when the choice of a non-academic role model helped to define Degas’s identity as one of the emerging leaders of the French avant-garde. 

This exhibition was organized by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, in association with the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Volume 59 (2011)/2

This recent volume of The Rijksmuseum Bulletin includes an essay entitled “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Edgar Degas Inspired by Rembrandt,” by Jenny Reynaerts (Senior Curator of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings at the Rijksmuseum and curator of the exhibition in Amsterdam) and Stella Versluis-Van Dongen (Rijksmuseum intern 2010-11, and co-researcher for the Bulletin essay and exhibition in Amsterdam).

The Rijksmuseum Bulletin is the English language academic journal of the Rijksmuseum, published quarterly. It offers scholarly articles contributing to the historical and art-historical research of the collections of the Rijksmuseum to an international audience of curators, scholars, students, art professionals and enthusiasts.

The Rijksmuseum Bulletin is published by the Rijksmuseum Publications Department.

Editors: Jan de Hond, Jenny Reynaerts, Marijn Schapelhouman

Printing: ÈPOS | PRESS, Zwolle