Edgar Degas was one of the founding members of the Impressionist group.
He was also a remarkable collector
and it is one aspect of his activities which is not
so well known and yet it's absolutely essential
to his achievements as an artist.
Degas died in September 1917 and six months later
three major sales were organised in Paris.
This is a catalogue of the first collection sale,
which happened on the 26 and 27 of March,
and it gives you an idea of the variety of objects
Degas had assembled during his life.
This collection encompassed in total
almost five hundred paintings and five thousand prints.
If we look through the pages of this catalogue,
in fact, we see that most of these pictures were bought in the 1890s,
which is when Degas's purchases intensified.
From then on he almost becomes compulsive,
obsessive about buying works.
And he goes to great lengths to
be able to acquire the art he really wants.
This is Manet's painting, 'The Execution of Maximilian',
which we're looking at ahead of its appearance in 'Painters' Paintings'.
As you'll see, the painting is in fragments.
It had been cut into pieces by the son of Madame Manet,
Léon Leenhoff.
And I think Degas was very thrilled when he found the first piece of the canvas,
the one that shows the sergeant
on the right-hand side, loading his rifle.
And he found it in the gallery of a Paris dealer called Alphonse Portier.
And we get a sense of this sort of really obsessive, passionate quality
that Degas had as a collector
because when he visited another dealer
whom he knew very well, Ambroise Vollard,
he found that Vollard had the large central piece,
which he then bought in exchange for 2,000 francs worth of his own work,
but he said to Vollard “You know, whatever you do,
you've got to try to find me the other pieces.”
Degas never succeeded in finding all of the fragments
but there's no doubt that when he was on the chase
of trying to acquire a work of art he was very,
very intense and competitive with other collectors.
“I buy! I buy! I can't stop myself.
The trouble is that people are beginning to know about it and are bidding against me
they know that when I want something, I absolutely must have it.”
Edgar Degas
