Description
Year of creation: c. 1872–1887
Original size: 49.8 cm x 65.7 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (inv. 2002.57)
The Convalescent – Edgar Degas
A woman sits with her head leaning on a raised hand, the elbow propped on the back of a chair. Her face is pale and the eyelids heavy; she looks out without lifting her head. It is a canvas painting of a condition rather than an event – someone between illness and the return to the world.
The figure and the clothing
Over a loose white gown she wears a heavy rust-brown wrap, open at the front and slipped from the shoulders. Her dark hair is unpinned and falls beside the face, without arrangement. The hand she leans on carries the whole weight of the head; the other rests lower, barely indicated. Nothing in the posture suggests a pose: the body has settled wherever it was easiest.
The space around her
To the left a white expanse of linen; above, a dark ground flecked with green. The room is not described – no wall, no furniture beyond the chair back the elbow rests on. That indefiniteness is what pushes attention onto the face and onto the colour of the wrap, the only warm area on the canvas.
Unfinish as a decision
The white gown is scraped thin in places and reworked, and lets the canvas show through. The paint is thin and in places merely suggested; the strokes stay visible and unresolved. In canvases like this Degas often stopped where enough had been said, and that stopping is part of the picture rather than a shortfall in it. To find the same hand at another task, look at the barre and at the café table in The Absinthe Drinker.
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. Small differences between individual copies follow from hand work and are not faults.
