Edgar Degas’ was an oeuvre which has come to be revered for the revolutionary strides it charted in the realm of figuration. Intérieur is an exceptionally rare example of Degas’ investigation into an inert yet instrumental element of his figurative works: the notion of inhabitance. Painted at a moment of artistic maturity in 1892, the present work speaks to the inimitable way in which Degas was able to communicate, or perhaps even transubstantiate a deeply human presence within a scene even in the absence of the figure. Toeing on the edge of sentimentality without succumbing to it, Degas offers a remarkably modern insight into the emotional resonance of the home itself. At his formidable hand, the quaint room becomes both a repository for and reflection of the artist’s personal history, and an exploration into the importance of domestic interiors as vehicles for constructions of self. As such, the work comes to stand as something of a portrait without a figurative subject, allowing the observational acuity for which Degas is so celebrated to take pride of place within the canvas.

Beginning in the 1860s, Degas made frequent summer pilgrimages to Ménil-Hubert, the Normandy estate of his schoolboy friend Paul Valpinçon (see fig. 1). The two met in 1846, when Degas was only 12, and it was Paul’s father, Edouard, who encouraged Degas’ embryonic fascination with the work of the French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres—an artist who would come to bear inimitable influence throughout Degas’ career. In both the home and its inhabitants, Degas found at Ménil-Hubert a wealth of subjects at ready for his painterly study.

It is in some of these earlier oils from his stays there, of the family members at rest within their home, that the reciprocal sense of embodiment between person and place which is so deeply felt within the present work begins to take root. This sense of symbiosis is in part due to the anecdotal nature of Degas’ framing. In his portrait of Madame Paul Valpinçon, her figure is cropped by the edge of the canvas, and seemingly pushed aside by the outgrowth of flowers teeming out from the vase (see fig. 2). In her dress, as in the comfortability of her pose, Madame Valpinçon appears to both absorb and be absorbed by her surroundings, a fixture of the home no less interchangeable than the table on which she languidly rests her arm. In his Portrait of Mlle. Hortense Valpinçon, the family’s eldest child and only daughter, Degas forgoes the conventional aspects of drawing which describe the room in the 1865 composition to instead depict the girl in isolation, framed only by the furniture before her and the wall behind (see fig. 3). As in his portrait of her mother, Degas catches Hortense in an off-hand moment, her head turned expectantly to meet his observant gaze. In the way that the rouge of her lips echoes the red flowers dappled throughout the wallpaper behind her, Degas visualizes the way in which the interior becomes an extension of the figure, and the figure an extension of the space they occupy within it. What he captures in these works, and is so beautifully crystalized through the absence of the figure in Intérieur, is the inherent, perceptible yet intangible, and above all else deeply human sense of belonging between person and place.

But the intimacy of the moments he is able to capture, or rather is permitted to capture in these works speaks also to Degas’ comfort within the home himself. The implications of this familiarity are nowhere greater felt than in the present. What is perhaps most enticing about this seemingly innocuous room is precisely that: the absence of any explicit narrative. But the particular time of day Degas chooses to capture, and the seemingly mindless yet exacting detail with which he paints speaks to an emotional significance which belies any possibility of the mere quotidian. Degas makes a conscious choice to depict the room in the presumably early afternoon, at a specific moment when the warm light flatters the interior as it pours through the window out of frame. Our understanding of his intimate familiarity with the decor proliferates further upon closer inspection. Through the careful placement of quick, staccato brushstrokes, Degas ingeniously evokes the intricate floral brocade of the wallpaper. He notes the towels and the way they hang at slightly different lengths along the rack, perhaps a result of the way he put them back after use. Each piece of furniture appears at rest, yet when taken as a whole, are brought to life through a sense of anticipation and a palpable potential energy, as if they sit in waiting for him to step up from his easel and employ them for his daily routine.

These distinctly personal, almost anecdotal details speak to the interior and its representation as a space for self-projection and in turn self-construction. It is in this way that Intérieur functions as something of a self-portrait of the artist. Yet in the absence of the figure, the furniture and decor of the room are assigned significance and personality, messengers of the emotional burden of meaning. In the present work, as in Van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom at Arles, or Egon Schiele’s of his in Neulengbach, there is the distinct sense that the artist is at once present within and diffused throughout the space (see figs. 4-5). What distinguishes Intérieur from these similar investigations is the distinctly natural perspective. The room is viewed at eye level, as if it was originally sketched while the artist was lying on the bed or seated elsewhere in the room. Whereas the subtle, convex angle created by the steep perspective in Van Gogh’s makes the objects appear larger than the imagined artist, and the elevated point of view in Schiele’s has the inverse effect of making the objects appear smaller, Degas’s importantly maintains a perspective which keeps the room on a distinctly human scale. And yet, his point of view is no less revolutionary on account of its proportionality.

Degas does not depict the room head on, but rather from a slightly oblique angle. While this fanned perspective opens the room to the viewer as if it envelops them and extends beyond the bounds of the canvas, there is an inverse effect at play which suggests that the mode of viewership is not active but embodied—that Degas’ point of view is inextricable from the room itself, that it completes it. In the absence of any pictured intrusion of the artist onto the painted space, Degas’s presence within Intérieur becomes omniscient, implied, yet at the same time remains distinctly human. Sharing in Degas’s point of view, the viewer comes to occupy an ambiguous third space, situated somewhere in between participant and spectator, immersed and yet altogether unreal. It is in these visual effects where memory and observation coalesce in a perfect harmony.

The effect is strikingly similar to that achieved in the work of Pierre Bonnard, whose primary subject, his wife, Marthe, was scarcely depicted outside the intimacy and comfort of their home. In his familiarity with his subject, Bonnard’s mode of address thus comes to occupy the lucid space between reality and a dream. Elements emerge from their surroundings as quickly as they dissolve, at once rendered with all of the specificity and all of the incompleteness of an image coming into focus. But where we expect to see a reflection in the mirror, or perhaps the artist’s shadow in the square of light on the floor, as we do in Bonnard’s The Dressing Room, we instead are left with a phantom (see fig. 6). It seems, in fact, that Degas went so far as to obscure or omit narrative in order to seduce the viewer through the unrevealed secrets implied in the suggestive power of his painting.

Historically dated to the 1870s, Intérieur was initially believed to depict the artist’s family home in New Orleans. However, after Paul Brame visited the Ménil-Hubert chateau after the war and recognized the rooms, the dating was amended by scholars including Theodore Reff to reflect its more probable execution in August of 1892, when Degas’ visited the Valpinçon home. The pendant to the present work, Salle de billard au Ménil-Hubert—one of the only other known paintings of uninhabited rooms—is now held at the Musée d’Orsay and is also dated to this 1892 stay (see figs. 7-8). The museum website cites a letter from Degas to his friend, sculptor Bartholomé, dated to 27 August 1892, in which Degas states that he must postpone his return to Paris once more because he had just started another painting: "I wanted to paint, and I decided to try billiard rooms. I thought I knew a bit about perspective, I knew nothing about it, and thought I could replace it through a process of perpendiculars and horizontals, by trying hard to calculate the angles in the spaces. I really worked at it." Interestingly, Degas treats the two rooms, each with a markedly different purpose, much the same, capturing similar diagonals in his depiction of light and shadow just as well as furnishings.

Though he does not give any clues in the way of explicit context, the intimate detail and palpable self-awareness with which he describes such interiors leads the viewer to conclude that the rooms he paints are those which he frequented time and time again during his visits to Ménil-Hubert. Degas not only allows for but invites the viewer to make the deeply personal transgression of entering into his intimate quarters. The door, swung wide open, likewise signals an invitation to exit or enter at will, as well as an openness with the house at large. This conception of the bedroom as a vehicle for the construction of self has continued to hold resonance, particularly as questions of identity came to the fore among contemporary artists living within an expanding geo-political world (see fig. 9). As such, the mode of viewership becomes divided between a sense of inexplicable belonging within the interior shared by Degas himself, and an unshakeable sense of intrusion at the realization that the familiarity with the space is not, in fact, their own. In sharing with the viewer the physical description of the room, and perhaps more importantly, his perception of it, Intérieur functions as something of a self-portrait of the artist himself.

Artist

Edgar Degas