Description
Year of creation: 1860s
Original size: 61 cm x 50 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Musée d’Orsay, Paris (inv. RF 2582)
The Cellist Pilet – Edgar Degas
A man in a dark suit sits in profile, turned to the left, looking past us. His hands rest on a table covered with a brown cloth, across which white sheets of music are scattered. The collar is white, the tie loosely knotted. Our canvas painting keeps that quiet concentration before a rehearsal.
An instrument painted like a face
The neck of the cello rises diagonally across his chest, and the scroll is painted as precisely as the face; at the right stands the dark body of the instrument and beside it a black music stand. At the left, the edge of a curtain and a window. That equality between the man and the instrument is a decision, not an accident.
A picture within the picture
Behind him a wall carries pale yellow paper with small blue-and-white flowers, and above it hangs a framed grey picture crowded with seated men in dark suits. The picture within the picture brings the orchestra into a room that holds one musician – the same doubling that The Ballet from Robert le Diable opens out across a whole canvas.
The players of the Opéra
In these years Degas painted several musicians of the Paris Opéra, among them the flautist Altès. Each is portrayed with his instrument rather than in front of it; the profession is not a background but a posture of the body.
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.
