As an artist, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) defies easy description. Allied with the French impressionists through his commitment to portraying modern life, he also took an independent course, preferring line over color and the visible brushstroke, and working in a studio instead of out-of-doors. He is perhaps best known as a painter, but his most widely known work is a sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. Executed in wax, near life-sized, dressed in a ballerina's tutu, with real ballet slippers and real hair, the sculpture caused a sensation when it was exhibited in 1881. It is the only sculpture Degas ever showed publicly, though more than one hundred--of dancers, horses, and bathers--were found in his studio after he died, all dusty, some fallen apart. For almost forty years after his death, these works were known only through the bronzes his heirs had cast from the originals.Then, in 1955, the waxes themselves appeared on the art market. Thanks to the discernment and generosity of Paul Mellon, the majority are now preserved at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, most on permanent display.
 This groundbreaking volume honors this extraordinary gift by linking art and science. It brings together the insights of a distinguished art historian of nineteenth-century painting and sculpture and the specialized knowledge of National Gallery conservators and scientists who have published pioneering technical studies. Including essays on Degas' life and work, his sculptural technique and materials, and the story of the sculptures after his death, it features art-historical and technical discussions of every work in the collection as well as indispensable concordances and bibliography. The richly illustrated text is intended for both art lover and specialist. Was Degas the sculptor technically inept or unusually inventive? How do we understand his sculpture in light of his paintings, prints, and photographs? These questions and many others are explored with originality and depth, adding immeasurably to our understanding of the artistic avant-garde in the late nineteenth century and to our appreciation of this controversial artist.

Edgar Degas Sculpture (National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogues)

Arts & Photography

Barbour, Daphne S.

Lindsay, Suzanne Glover

Sturman, Shelley G.

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

The National Gallery's collection of nineteenth-century sculpture is dominated by thirty-seven works by Auguste Rodin, among them The Kiss, and Honoré Daumier's celebrated portrait busts. These works, as well as sculptures by Antoine-Louis Barye, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Paul Gauguin, and Theodore Gericault, are examined in unprecedented depth, shedding new light on many issues of scholarship. An essay about Rodin and Mrs. John W. Simpson, the artist's most important American patron, and a selection of letters between the Simpsons and Rodin chronicle this artist-patron relationship. Works by American sculptors of the period--Bela Lyon Pratt, William Rimmer, Augustus Saint- Gaudens, and Henry Merwin Shrady--are also included here.

European Sculpture of the Nineteenth Century (National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogues)

Butler, Ruth

Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult: Living with the Dead in France, 1750-1870

Even before the upheaval of the Revolution, France sought a new formal language for a regenerated nation. Nowhere is this clearer than in its tombs, some among its most famous modern sculpture-rarely discussed as funerary projects. Unlike other art-historical studies of tombs, this one frames sculptural examples within the full spectrum of the material funerary arts of the period, along with architecture and landscape. This book further widens the standard scope to shed new and needed light on the interplay of the funerary arts, tomb cult, and the mentalities that shaped them in France, over a period famous for profound and often violent change. Suzanne Glover Lindsay also brings the abundant recent work on the body to the funerary arts and tomb cult for the first time, confronting cultural and aesthetic issues through her examination of a celebrated sculptural type, the recumbent effigy of the deceased in death. Using many unfamiliar period sources, this study reinterprets several famous tombs and funerals and introduces significant enterprises that are little known today to suggest the prominent place held by tomb cult in nineteenth-century France. Images of the tombs complement the text to underline sculpture's unique formal power in funerary mode.

Routledge

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Books by Lindsay, Suzanne Glover