About this work
Using colored oil paints overlaid with scumbled pastels, Degas produced a view of a mountainous landscape, partially obscured by mist, that verges on abstraction. There are no figures, no dancers, no café-goers — only a rolling terrain emerging from and dissolving back into atmosphere. The palette is earthy and vaporous at once: ochres and greens anchoring the land while the mist bleeds upward into a sky that offers no clean horizon. The composition has no single entry point so much as a slow, pervasive pressure — the feeling of countryside glimpsed at speed, half-remembered, rendered not as a record but as an impression burned into the mind. Degas worked on the plates using diluted oil paint, creating effects by rubbing the medium with cloths or brushes, sometimes using the end of a brush handle or his finger to create lines or other forms — a process as physical and improvisational as anything in his studio.
Degas undertook this series of landscape monotypes during a visit in October 1890 to the Burgundian estate of his friend, the artist Pierre-Georges Jeanniot. Over the course of the next two years, he made about fifty monotypes, a group of which he exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery in 1892 — and although the artist called these views "imaginary landscapes," they are thought to reflect his experience traveling through Burgundy in a horse-drawn carriage.
That November 1892 exhibition at Durand-Ruel's gallery turned out to be the artist's only solo exhibition held during his lifetime.
*Landscape* is an unexpected instance of Degas presenting an outdoor scene with no figures, showing an imaginative and expressive use of color and freedom of line that may have arisen, at least in part, as a result of his struggle to adapt to his deteriorating vision.
The fact that Degas used oil paint in place of standard printer's ink was a radical move — monotype was already a new technique, and taking it to this more abstract and colorful place was a hallmark in the progress of monotype as a medium.
As wall art, *Landscape* rewards rooms that can hold stillness — a study, a reading room, a bedroom where early morning light comes in soft and low. It doesn't announce itself; it accumulates. The work speaks to the viewer who already loves Degas but wants to meet a different side of him — one who worked from memory rather than observation, yielding vague and sometimes near-abstract compositions that feel less like depictions of a place and more like the emotional residue of having passed through one. It pairs naturally with other works on paper: works that reward closeness and repay repeated looking. Hang it where the light shifts through the day, and the mist in the painting will seem to shift with it.
