Description
Year of creation: 1870s
Original size: 39.5 cm x 54.5 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Musée d’Orsay, Paris (inv. RF 3736)
Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste De Gas – Edgar Degas
A dark brown room with two framed pictures on the wall. In the foreground sits a younger man with dark curly hair and a thick moustache, in a black suit with a tie and a small flower on the lapel; in his lap he holds a guitar whose pale body fills the lower half of the canvas. Our hand-painted oil painting keeps exactly that relation between bright wood and the darkness around it.
The guitar as the only light
The left hand is on the neck of the instrument, the right above the sound hole. The body of the guitar is the brightest plane in the scene and works like a source of light rather than an object merely receiving it. Everything else – the suit, the wall, the shadow behind the two figures – is built from related browns, so the picture reads almost as a single tone with a single bright patch.
The man who only listens
Behind the singer and slightly to the right sits an older man, balding, with a white moustache, in dark clothes, his hands loosely joined and his head slightly bowed. He neither plays nor sings; his one action is listening. At the upper left, scores and papers lie on a small table, the only sign that the scene repeats and that this is not a single performance.
Two ways of listening
The scene is built on the difference between two ways of listening: one plays and looks straight ahead, the other only listens and looks down. Music returns in Degas’s portrait of Mademoiselle Dihau at the piano and in the orchestra at the opera. The canvas measures 39.5 x 54.5 cm, it was made in the 1870s, and the painter kept it with him to the end of his life; it is today in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
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.
