Edgar Degas: Six Friends at Dieppe

This is beautifully designed book looks at a close circle of artists and intellectuals portrayed by Edgar Degas in the late summer of 1885. On the heels of Ludovic Halevy’s election to the Academie Francaise, Degas joined his close friend’s family for a holiday on the Normandy coast. Inspired by group photographs, he staged an eccentric portrait composed of Halevy and his son, Daniel, young painters Jacques-Emil Blanch, Henri Gervex, and Walter Sickert, and an elusive man of taste, Albert Boulanger-Cave. Four essays examine the creation of the enigmatic portrait and narrate the intense and conflicting friendships it embodied. Maureen C.O’Brien presents the portrait as a performance of Jane Roberts explores Jacques Emil-Blanche’s lifelong attachment to Anna Gruetzner Robins addresses the presence of British painter Walter Linda Catano analyzes the physical construction of the large pastel portrait and its place in Degas’s technical development of this medium. Aproximately 95 illustration – 55 which are color, 14 photographs