jason.zweig
Edgar Degas, "Portraits at the Stock Exchange," 1878 or 1879
In this dark, almost monochromatic image, Degas shows the financier Ernest May, who funded the Eiffel Tower (among other projects), getting a tip at the Paris Bourse. In an earlier pastel sketch of this scene from life, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search...), Degas portrayed May and the figure behind him in sky-blue suits and with detailed faces. Here, the scene has been stripped of all bright colors, as if Degas were painting with a brush dipped in murk. The men's flesh has darkened to cadaverous tones, their faces blurred by greed. The man standing behind May grasps his shoulder lightly, apparently whispering a stock tip in May's right ear, but the tipster's hat nearly falls off his head toward us in his excitement. (He also echoes the pose of Satan in Giotto's painting of Judas receiving the betrayal money www.flickr.com/photos/133126466@N08/19752612385/in/album-....) May's face is supercilious and calm, but his right hand is a grasping flutter as he reads a shred of tape torn from the stock ticker. The two men in the back corner whisper conspiratorially, throwing oddly tall shadows up the wall behind them, as if the only light were coming from below. All told, the scene is seething with sinister, repressed excitement. Degas, the son of a failed banker, may have intended the painting as an anti-Semitic screed, but it also evokes the French public's distrust of the stock exchange as a public institution.
www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/painting...
Edgar Degas, "Portraits at the Stock Exchange," 1878 or 1879
In this dark, almost monochromatic image, Degas shows the financier Ernest May, who funded the Eiffel Tower (among other projects), getting a tip at the Paris Bourse. In an earlier pastel sketch of this scene from life, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search...), Degas portrayed May and the figure behind him in sky-blue suits and with detailed faces. Here, the scene has been stripped of all bright colors, as if Degas were painting with a brush dipped in murk. The men's flesh has darkened to cadaverous tones, their faces blurred by greed. The man standing behind May grasps his shoulder lightly, apparently whispering a stock tip in May's right ear, but the tipster's hat nearly falls off his head toward us in his excitement. (He also echoes the pose of Satan in Giotto's painting of Judas receiving the betrayal money www.flickr.com/photos/133126466@N08/19752612385/in/album-....) May's face is supercilious and calm, but his right hand is a grasping flutter as he reads a shred of tape torn from the stock ticker. The two men in the back corner whisper conspiratorially, throwing oddly tall shadows up the wall behind them, as if the only light were coming from below. All told, the scene is seething with sinister, repressed excitement. Degas, the son of a failed banker, may have intended the painting as an anti-Semitic screed, but it also evokes the French public's distrust of the stock exchange as a public institution.
www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/painting...