Description
Year of creation: 1857
Original size: 41 cm x 53 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Musée d’Orsay, Paris (inv. RF 3661)
Hilaire de Gas – Edgar Degas
An older man sits in an armchair with a pale striped cover and looks straight at us, without a smile. The hair is white and thin, the face strongly lined, the eyes dark and attentive. Our hand painted version keeps exactly that unyielding presence.
Clothing worked out precisely
A dark coat, a white shirt with a black bow at the neck, a pale waistcoat and light green trousers that take up much of the lower half of the canvas. In his right hand he holds a dark cane running diagonally across his lap, which gives the seated figure its one sharp line. Every part of the dress is handled differently: the cloth matt, the shirt bright, the trousers almost flat.
The ground and the single object
The background is nearly black and without detail; only at the lower left a pile of reddish books is indicated. Nothing else draws attention from the face and the hands. That absence of narrative is the same decision as in the portrait of Bonnat: to say how someone is, not what he does.
A painter of twenty-three
The sitter was the painter’s grandfather, Hilaire de Gas; Degas painted him in Naples when he was himself twenty-three. This is therefore the earliest Degas, three years before the Spartan subject, and everything is already in it: a lined face treated without pity and at the same time without cruelty.
Our version
Our version is a hand-painted oil painting on canvas. Every canvas is painted individually, in the size and frame you choose. The painter works from the original with brush and oils, so the strokes and the layering stay visible – the part a print cannot reproduce.
