
Estérel Villagec. 1890
This landscape is one of many monotypes that Edgar Degas produced throughout his career. The work belongs to a series Degas made while visiting a friend in the French countryside. More about this work
About this work
This landscape is one of many monotypes that Edgar Degas produced throughout his career. The work belongs to a series Degas made while visiting a friend in the French countryside. Its blurriness resembles the view he saw out the window of trains and carriages during his travels. To translate the effects of weather and the natural terrain, he created layers of color and texture that border on abstraction in the final composition.
Text from the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Edgar Degas
French, 1834–1917 · Born and died in Paris.
Degas trained in the academic tradition, admired Ingres and spent three years in Italy copying earlier art, but turned to modern Paris for his subjects: dancers, racecourses, laundresses, milliners and café singers. He helped organise the Impressionist exhibitions and showed in all but one, yet preferred to call himself a realist. Working from drawing and memory rather than outdoors, he composed with unexpected cropping and viewpoints, and in later years worked mostly in pastel as his eyesight failed.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Impressionism
Painters in 1870s Paris who worked quickly, often outdoors, to catch light as it changed.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Cleveland Museum of Art has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1966.177
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art
- Type
- Department
- Prints
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site



















