About this work
In this self-portrait, a young Edgar Degas turns his head to look out at the spectator, wearing casual clothes — an open collar and a broad-brimmed hat.
The informal, extreme close-up of his face and his impassive, almost sullen expression echo the unpretentiousness of his clothing, while the small-scale presentation and lightness of touch emphasize the intimacy of the image and the still-tentative character of the young artist.
The portrait displays Degas's debt to Ingres — the conservative, academic palette of greens, yellows, and browns is a world apart from the Impressionist palette most associated with his mature work.
His aloof, slightly pouty, patrician features are rendered with an unsparing directness , and the shadowy contrast of light and dark reflects his interest, at this particular moment in his career, in the work of Rembrandt.
At the start of his career, Degas produced some forty self-portraits in various media — works that served not only as a record of his appearance, but also as a survey of his own artistic development.
Around 1857, when he was twenty-three or twenty-four, Degas traveled to Italy, where he spent much of his time making copies after Renaissance masters — a period of intense self-education during which he wrote in one of his notebooks, "I must thoroughly realize I know nothing at all."
He approached self-portraits as a platform for experimentation, and most remained in his studio until his death.
The work also reveals the influence of Spanish and Dutch Baroque painting on Degas's early output: the pyramidal, balanced composition is wholly in keeping with Renaissance and Baroque portraiture, particularly the self-portraits of Velázquez. This is the Degas before the ballet, before the café-concerts and the racetrack — a young man measuring himself against the masters, earnest and unguarded in a way his later work rarely permitted.
This portrait belongs in a quiet interior where it can hold a wall without competing. A study, a narrow hallway, or a sitting room with warm ambient light would suit it well — somewhere the gaze has room to land and register. Although Degas depicted himself in a serious, almost dour attitude, the viewer is drawn to the portrait for its honesty and forthright outward stare — not the dull, generalized look of academic portraiture, but something that exudes the full intensity of his personality. It speaks to the viewer who prizes restraint over spectacle, and who finds more interest in the artist before the fame than in the legend that followed.
