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Edgar DEGAS Portrait of Ludovic Halévy, circa...

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Edgar DEGAS Portrait of Ludovic Halévy, circa 1895-1896 DEGAS Edgar (Paris 1834 † 1917 id.) Original photograph. Vintage gelatino silver bromide print. H82xW74mm. Ref: Malcolm Daniel, "Catalogue raisonné des photographies de Degas, et recensement des épreuves connues", in collectif, Edgar Degas, photographe, cat. exp. (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, May 27 - August 22, 1999), Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1999, n°13, p. 129 (reproduced). Extremely rare. Only one other known print (Los Angeles, The Jean-Paul Getty Museum, inv. 86.XM.690.3). The J. P. Getty Museum print, a few millimeters wider on the left (81 x 78 mm), reveals the beginning of a pedestal table. On the other hand, it appears to be cropped on the right-hand side compared to our print (the vase is less visible) and slightly shorter in height. Another variant of this portrait exists (ref.: Malcom Daniel no. 14): it is framed slightly off to the right, with Halévy looking away from the lens. A print of this variant was sold at Christie's on October 6, 1998 (lot no. 81); a second is in the Clark Institute of Art (inv. 1998.43). In the early 1890s, Degas gradually gave in to his passion for the darkroom, abandoning pencils and brushes for a time. In particular, he photographed members of the Halévy family in a dozen intimate shots: "Around 1890, when he photographed Ludovic and Louis Halévy, he dined at their home two or three times a week - Degas was happiest when his models were comfortably inert, immobilized, not by the vice of the old-fashioned daguerreotype, but by the amply upholstered cushions of the armchair or when they had "dozed off" during the "terrible quarter of an hour" of posing they had to endure. [...] [Degas] photographed no one he didn't know very well, although this may be an erroneous assertion, based on the only photos that have survived to the present day "50. A close friend of Degas, whose passion for opera he shared, the writer and librettist Ludovic Halévy (1834-1908), co-author of the libretto for George Bizet's Carmen (1875), also appears in several of the artist's prints and drawings devoted to the backstage world (including an important 1879 pastel, preserved at the Musée d'Orsay).

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