Description
Year of creation: 1868
Original size: 21.6 cm x 27 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. 29.100.181)
Joseph-Henri Altès – Edgar Degas
A man’s head is painted in strict profile, turned to the left. The forehead is high and bare, the hair remaining only at the sides and behind the ear, the beard thick and dark. Our canvas painting keeps that severity of a small format.
An ear as a separate study
The ear is worked out with unusual precision, almost as a separate study. On a canvas barely twenty-odd centimetres across, it is the only detail carried to completion; everything else is summarised. That unevenness of attention is what tells you where the painter was actually looking.
A ground without depth
The ground is a uniform olive brown, without object and without depth, so the head sits on it as on a medallion. Below, only a white collar and the dark shoulder of a coat separate from the darkness. The same absence of a room as in the portrait of the grandfather: nothing may compete with the face.
A musician from the Opéra
The sitter was the flautist Joseph-Henri Altès, a musician of the Paris Opéra; in these years Degas portrayed several of its players. The same orchestra that here sits for one man appears three years later in full in The Ballet from Robert le Diable. The signature is at the upper left, which is rare for him.
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.
