Description
Year of creation: 1866
Original size: 40 cm x 53 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. 29.100.44)
The Collector of Prints – Edgar Degas
A bearded man in a black bowler and a dark coat sits leaning slightly forward. On his knees he holds an open green portfolio full of prints; with his right hand he touches a sheet of flowers. His look goes sideways, not toward us. Our canvas painting keeps exactly that absorption in an object.
A room that is an inventory
Behind him a table carries further portfolios, loose sheets and a single pink flower. At the upper right hangs a dark board with fabrics, cards and small photographs pinned to it. At the left a wooden cabinet with a glass vitrine rises, and inside it stands a pale horse figurine. Every object is something somebody carried home and kept.
A portrait of a habit
The scene is a portrait of a habit rather than of a person: everything around the man is sheets, folders and samples. He does not pose and does not address us; the hand on the sheet matters more than the face. That same decision – to say how somebody lives rather than who he is by name – separates this from the portrait of the grandfather, where there was no object at all except a cane.
Before the ballet
Degas painted it at thirty-two, before he found the ballet. The interest in a person caught mid-task rather than placed before an audience is therefore older than the dancers – it is already here, and a few years later at the table in The Absinthe Drinker.
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.
