HILAIRE-GERMAIN-EDGAR DEGAS, PARIS, 1834-1917 THE HEAD OF THE VIRGIN, AFTER PERUGINO |

Pencil on pale grey paper. Stamped with the Degas vente stamp (Lugt 658) in red at the lower left

The studio of the artist, Paris.
The fourth Vente Degas, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 2nd-4th July 1919, lot 113c (‘Tête de jeune fille’)¹, bt. Vignier for 1,120 francs.
Collection of Charles Vignier, Paris.²
His sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 21st May 1931, lot 93 (‘Tête de jeune fille’), sold for 520 francs to Peyrent).
Collection of Bernard Chappard, Paris and Venezuela.
His sale (‘Vente au profit de la Fondation Daniela Chappard’), Paris, Hôtel Drouot [Cornet de Saint-Cyr], 13th March 2000, lot 22.
A private collection.
Christie’s London, 8th February 2007, lot 514.

Perugino: Raffaels Meister, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 2011-2012, no. 38.
Degas: Klassik und Experiment, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, 2014-2015, no. 16.

John Walker, 'Degas et les maîtres anciens', Gazette des Beaux-Arts, September 1933, p. 185.
Franco Russoli and Fiorella Minervino, L'opera completa di Degas, Milan, 1970, pp. 86-87, no. 3.
Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey, 'Da David a Picasso, il Perugino e la Francia', in Laura Teza, ed., Pietro Vannucci il Perugino: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di studio, 25-28 ottobre 2000, Perugia, 2004, p. 378, p. 394, fig. 15.
Caterina Zappia, 'La sfortuna di Perugino nella Francia dell'Ottocento', in Vittoria Garibaldi and Francesco Federico Mancini, eds, Perugino, il divin pittore, exhibition catalogue, Perugia, 2004, p. 415, note 54.
Annette Haudiquet et al., De Delacroix à Marquet: Donation Senn-Foulds – Dessins, 2011, pp. 115 and 118 ('Lots convoités par Olivier Senn dont les enchères ont dépassé les limites qu'il s'était fixées').
Oliver Kase, '"Wo aller Lärm der Leidenschaft entfernt ist": Zur Popularität Peruginos im Jahrhundert', in Andreas Schumacher, ed., Perugino: Raffaels Meister, exhibition catalogue, Munich, 2011, pp. 164-165.
Andreas Schumacher, ed., Perugino: Raffaels Meister, exhibition catalogue, Munich, 2011, pp. 278-279, no. 38 (entry by Oliver Kase).
Alexander Eiling, ed., Degas: Klassik und Experiment, exhibition catalogue, Karlsruhe, 2014-2015, pp. 97-99, no. 16 (entry by Alexander Eiling).

The drawing has been remounted. As visible in the catalogue photo, there are accretion spots and minor discolouration to the surface and edges. There are also minor hairline creases to the edges visible under recking light. Otherwise good condition. This is not examined out of its frame.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Aptly described as "one of the most passionate and convinced copyists of his time",³ Edgar Degas spent much of his early career engaged in a serious study of Renaissance art, resulting in a significant number of drawn and painted copies by the artist. He first registered as a copyist at the Louvre in April 1853, and soon began making drawings after Old Master paintings in the museum’s collection, with a particular emphasis on Italian art of the 15th and early 16th centuries. (At the same time he also began copying Old Master prints in the Bibliothèque Nationale, as well as works in the collection of the École des Beaux-Arts.) Degas maintained the practice during his three-year stay in Italy between 1856 and 1859, drawing numerous copies after works in Florence, Rome and Naples. This was a task in which he was also encouraged by his father; in a letter of January 1859, written to his son in Florence, Auguste De Gas advised the young artist that "the masters of the fifteenth century are the only true guides; once they have thoroughly made their mark and inspired a painter unceasingly to perfect his study of nature, results are assured".⁴ On his return to Paris, Degas carried on copying works of art in the Louvre, and in fact continued to register as a copyist in the museum until 1862. Among the Quattrocento and Cinquecento paintings copied by the young Degas were works by Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello, Filippino Lippi, Mantegna, Lorenzo di Credi, Vittore Carpaccio, Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Giovanni Bellini, Perugino, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian and many others. As the artist himself said, "One must copy and recopy the masters, and only after having given every proof of being a good copyist can one reasonably be expected to paint a radish from nature".⁵

Most of the drawn and painted copies by Degas may be dated to the formative years of the artist’s career, between 1858 and 1861, and several of the motifs and figures he copied were later integrated into his own paintings. As Theodore Reff has noted, "The interest in older art…was indeed so extensive in Degas’s early career, and at the same time so pervasive an influence on his own art, that his activity throughout the 1850s may be described as essentially that of a copyist",⁶ while another scholar has written that ‘Through copying Degas acquired at a very early stage that sureness and maturity which always astonished critics.’⁷ In many of these early drawings Degas used a soft pencil and a coarse, flocked greyish paper, as in the present sheet.

This recently rediscovered drawing is a copy after the head of the Virgin in a panel painting of The Virgin and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Catherine of Alexandria (fig. 1) by the Umbrian artist Pietro Perugino (c.1450-1523) in the Louvre.⁸ Painted around 1493, at the height of Perugino’s career, this small devotional picture was acquired by the Louvre in 1821. The present sheet is typical of Degas’ copies after Renaissance masters, and his own particular interest in individual studies of heads and figures, isolated from a more crowded composition. As one scholar has noted, "In loose drawings, and more rarely in oils, [Degas] recorded memorable portraits as he encountered them…Sometimes he singled out individual heads in altarpieces or frescos and treated them as portraits…His liking for the precision, for the unadorned purity of early portraits persisted for decades".⁹ Among stylistically comparable drawings by Degas, for example, is one in the Baltimore Museum of Art,¹⁰ which copies a head of a single youth from Raphael’s large and crowded fresco of The School of Athens in the Vatican.

Studies such as this were of particular importance to Degas’s development as a portrait painter: "The young portraitist was making himself conversant with the prototypes in the history of the genre, in all its many variants, as they had been formed at the time of the Italian Renaissance. In copying he was laying out his imaginary portrait gallery. He was primarily concerned with artistic questions rather than physiognomy. His interest as a copyist was directed primarily to the composition, from head only to full length, from profile to full face".¹¹

Degas copied a number of other paintings by Perugino, including figures from an Ascension of Christ in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, in a sketchbook now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.¹² It was perhaps thinking of Renaissance paintings such as those by Perugino that Degas is said to have once remarked: "So there is no bias in art? What about the Italian Primitives, who express the softness of lips by imitating them with hard lines, and make eyes come to life by cutting off the eyelids as if with a pair of scissors?"<sup>13

1</sup> At the fourth and final Degas studio sale in July 1919, the present sheet was sold framed together with two other drawings after Italian Renaissance works; one a Head of Christ and the other a study after the figure of an executioner in Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael’s Massacre of the Innocents.
² The poet, writer and Oriental art scholar Charles Vignier (1863-1934) owned a large and significant group of around sixty paintings, pastels and drawings by Degas.
³ Emil Maurer, ‘Degas’s Copies’, in Felix Baumann and Marianne Karabelnik, ed., Degas Portraits, exhibition catalogue, Zurich and Tübingen, 1994-1995, p. 151.
⁴ In a letter to Degas in Florence of 4 January 1859; Quoted in translation in Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., Degas, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Ottawa and New York, 1988-1989, p. 88, under no. 27.
⁵ ‘Il faut copier et recopier les maîtres, et ce n’est qu’après avoire donné toutes les preuves d’un bon copiste qu’il pourra raisonnablement vous être permis de faire un radis d’après nature.’; quoted in Ambroise Vollard, Degas, Paris, 1924, p. 64.
⁶ Theodore Reff, ‘New Light on Degas’s Copies’, The Burlington Magazine, June 1964, p. 250.
⁷ Maurer, op.cit., p. 156.
⁸ Inv. 720; Carlo Castellaneta and Ettore Camesasca, L’opera completa del Perugino, Milan, 1969, p.93, no.35; Pietro Scarpellini, Perugino, Milan, 1991, p. 87, no. 57, p. 183, fig. 90; Vittoria Garibaldi, Perugino: Catalogo completo, Florence, 1999, p. 114, no. 34, illustrated in colour p. 36.
⁹ Maurer, op.cit., pp. 152-153.
¹⁰ David P. Becker et al., The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas, exhibition catalogue, Baltimore and elsewhere, 2005-2006, pp. 184-187, no. 39 (entry by Victor Carlson).
¹¹ Emil Maurer, ‘Portraits as Pictures: Degas between Taking a Likeness and Making a Work of Art (Tableau)’, in Baumann and Karabelnik, ed., op.cit., p. 101. Dupuy-Vachey, op.cit., p. 397, figs 24-26.
¹² Théodore Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar Degas, Oxford, 1976, Vol. I, p. 40 [Notebook 2, pp. 47, 49 and 51].
¹³ Daniel Halévy, Degas parle…, Paris and Geneva, 1960, p. 56; Quoted in translation in Maurer, ‘Degas’s Copies’, op.cit., p. 154.