Paysage au bord de la mer

In the autumn of 1890 Degas travelled through Burgundy in a horse-drawn trap with his friend the sculptor Bartholomé, watching the country go past for days on end. He was 56 and his eyesight was already failing. What he made afterwards in the studio were landscapes from memory, oil colour brushed onto a metal plate, pressed once onto a sheet of paper, then worked over with pastel while the image was still soft. Durand-Ruel showed about two dozen of them in Paris in 1892. That was the only solo exhibition Degas allowed in his lifetime, and it consisted entirely of landscapes, from a painter the public knew for dancers and laundresses.