About this work
A narrow path cuts through an open field, pulling the eye toward a soft, hazy horizon — and the first thing that strikes you about *Pathway in a Field* is how unlike the Degas you think you know it is. Made in 1890 using pastel over monotype in oil colors , the work is intimate in scale — just under twelve by sixteen inches at the platemark — yet expansive in feeling. Warm earth tones anchor the foreground while greens and ochres ripple across the middle distance. The path itself is not so much drawn as suggested: a pale corridor of open ground pressing through dense vegetation toward the light. The surface has the particular luminosity of Degas's pastel-over-monotype process, where the underlying monotype serves as a tonal map and the pastel is layered on top — giving the work a richness that feels simultaneously printed and painted, fixed and breathing.
In 1890, two decades after a short landscape campaign on the Normandy coast, Degas suddenly returned to landscape, finishing many works in pastel over monotype prints he made during a visit to a friend near Dijon in the autumn of that year.
He undertook the series during a visit to the Burgundian estate of his friend Pierre-Georges Jeanniot in October 1890, calling these views "imaginary landscapes."
Degas described his landscape monotypes as imaginary, and he was not interested in details. That creative freedom — memory and invention over direct observation — gives *Pathway in a Field* its dreamlike authority. In November 1892, twenty-one of these landscapes were brought together for Degas's first one-man exhibition, held at Durand-Ruel's gallery in Paris — the only solo exhibition held during his lifetime.
The original now resides in the Yale University Art Gallery, acquired through the Katharine Ordway Fund.
On a wall, this is a work that rewards stillness. Its muted palette — golds, greens, dusty pinks — suits a room with natural light and quiet ambition: a study, a library, a hallway that deserves more than a glance. Degas's aim in such compositions was quite different from Monet's preoccupation with changing atmospheric effects; while rooted in experience, his landscapes of memory are brooding and mysterious. The viewer it speaks to isn't looking for the stage or the barre — they're looking for that rarer Degas: the one who turned away from the crowd and found, in a simple path through an ordinary field, something unresolved and quietly urgent.
