Description
Year of creation: 1863
Original size: 37.7 cm x 45.8 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Musée Bonnat-Helleu, Bayonne (inv. 69)
Portrait of Léon Bonnat – Edgar Degas
A young man is painted down to the shoulders, turned very slightly towards us. He wears a pale top hat with a dark band, and short brown hair shows beneath it at the front. The beard is full and dark, the face narrow. It is a hand painted likeness of a friend rather than of a client.
The face and the look
His look goes down and to the right, past the viewer; the expression is serious, almost withheld. Nothing in the face solicits our approval – the sitter is not posing for us but sitting for a painter who knows him. The collar is white and high, the tie loosely knotted, the coat dark and without detail, so that all the attention gathers in the face and in the shadow under the hat brim.
The ground is not a room but a wall of brick and ochre, laid on in broad visible strokes. There is no furniture, no window, no sign of a profession. That absence of setting is a decision: the portrait does not report the sitter’s station, it reports how he looks when he is silent.
Who the sitter was
The sitter was the painter Léon Bonnat, a friend of Degas from their Roman years; the signature is at the upper left. Both were at the start of their careers and both had studied the old masters in Rome. Bonnat went on to become a sought-after portraitist and teacher, while Degas turned elsewhere entirely – to café tables and rehearsal rooms. The canvas hangs today in the museum that carries Bonnat’s name.
The early Degas
The year 1863 places this canvas alongside his history experiments, among them the Spartan subject. The format is small but the handling is already quick and confident: the face is built with thin, exact strokes while the ground is swept in with movements he made no attempt to hide. That difference of speed between the head and its surroundings is what keeps the picture alive.
Our version
Our version is a hand-painted oil painting on canvas. Each canvas is made 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.
