Portrait d'Edmond Duranty

Degas made this in 1879 of a friend who had done more than most to explain what Degas and his circle were up to. Edmond Duranty was a novelist and critic, and three years earlier he had written a short pamphlet, The New Painting, arguing that this new art belonged to modern life, the office, the street, the man at his desk. So Degas set him exactly there, hemmed in by the books and papers of his trade, fingers pressed to his temple. It is worked in gouache and pastel rather than oil, quick and dry. Duranty did not see it hang for long. He died in the spring of 1880, and the portrait went on the wall at the Impressionists' fifth exhibition only weeks later.