La Coiffure (Combing the hair), c1896
Edgar Degas
Oil on canvas
Degas creates something extraordinary by using an almost monochrome palette to depict a servant combing a woman's hair. The reds merge foreground with background, and this flattening and deliberate lack of resolution leaves the precise location and meaning of the work open to interpretation. The painting was later owned by Henri Matisse who was inspired to create his own series of red interiors.*
From the exhibition
After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art
(March – August 2023)
Explore a period of great upheaval when artists broke with established tradition and laid the foundations for the art of the 20th and the 21st centuries.
The decades between 1880 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 were a complex, vibrant period of artistic questioning, searching, risk-taking and innovation.
The exhibition celebrates the achievements of three giants of the era: Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and follows the influences they had on younger generations of French artists, on their peers and on wider circles of artists across Europe in Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels and Vienna.
With nearly a hundred works by artists ranging from Klimt and Munch, Matisse and Picasso to Mondrian and Kandinsky complemented by a selection of sculpture by artists including Rodin and Camille Claudel, the exhibition follows the creation of a new, modern art, free of convention, taking in Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction.
[*National Gallery]
Taken in the National Gallery
La Coiffure (Combing the hair), c1896
Edgar Degas
Oil on canvas
Degas creates something extraordinary by using an almost monochrome palette to depict a servant combing a woman's hair. The reds merge foreground with background, and this flattening and deliberate lack of resolution leaves the precise location and meaning of the work open to interpretation. The painting was later owned by Henri Matisse who was inspired to create his own series of red interiors.*
From the exhibition
After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art
(March – August 2023)
Explore a period of great upheaval when artists broke with established tradition and laid the foundations for the art of the 20th and the 21st centuries.
The decades between 1880 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 were a complex, vibrant period of artistic questioning, searching, risk-taking and innovation.
The exhibition celebrates the achievements of three giants of the era: Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and follows the influences they had on younger generations of French artists, on their peers and on wider circles of artists across Europe in Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels and Vienna.
With nearly a hundred works by artists ranging from Klimt and Munch, Matisse and Picasso to Mondrian and Kandinsky complemented by a selection of sculpture by artists including Rodin and Camille Claudel, the exhibition follows the creation of a new, modern art, free of convention, taking in Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction.
[*National Gallery]
Taken in the National Gallery