Portrait Of Recuperation By Mary Degas

While the young girl on the lower right has the look of obedience and is part of the mother. The second child; is oppose of the other child because she isn’t part of either of her parents. She in the painting is not fully turned, facing her father and also clearly, unruly based on her hair and posture. The father is in a position of being worried about her or something else going on in his life.
He made this painting and some of his earlier portraits in the spirit of recuperation. “Recuperation; is of the minutely descriptive, fully consumed and accoutrement likeness, and its various traditions, northern, Italian and French, royal, aristocratic, and bourgeois. Degas put this spirit in this painting like what has been done in Ingles’ portrait paintings. He was doing what has been done since the tradition of
the Florence Renaissance seen in the artists; for example, Botticello and Michelangelo.
Apparently, this painting and his other earlier portraits he did, were a beginning to where he starts to show, paint in rigorous representational formation, descriptive capacity that goes on to appear in his later works. In his later works; he goes against these two principals that shown in his family portraits, which is showed in unfinished painting of one his relatives that is Edmondo and Therese Morbille, figure four. He was clearly working with these principles but decided to drop them, and left it unfinished.
He also does this in the other paintings of his female members and with their spouses. A comparison can be seen in the two paintings he did of his sister, Therese de Gas, figure eleven. He did a portrait of her before she was married to her husband Edmond Morbili and a double portrait after she was married to him in 1865. He shows her when she is not married is seen as imposing and stable figure. But in the Edmond and Therese Morbil painting, she is seen as been dependent on her husband to shield her from the world, figure nine. These paintings are his attempt to recreate aspects from the past masters in his family portraits, but evens up dropping this from later works of art. This also includes emotional depth he displays that are found in these paintings that were also were not to show up in his later works of art from this time period. The third and last main piece of art work of Degas that is getting mentioned is Portrait of Mary Cassatt Seated, Holding Card, figure four.
This painting is a portrait that is his featuring his friend and fellow artist Mary Cassatt. His friendship with her, other female artists and the encouragement he gave them was different from what other artists’ views on women were during this time. He is often compared against with Renoir and Manet views of women in their works of art. “..Whose interest in women seems to have been confined to their sexuality and their suitability as models”, while with Manet it was “... Whose behavior towards women was conventionally chivalric.”
She is not the only female friend of his social circle he painted portraits of, i.e. Marie Dihau and Victoria Dubourg. The characteristics he admired about these women were that they were creative and smart. He painted Dubourg in her portrait as a woman who is dressed conservative for the time period she was painted in and sensible in figure thirteenth. Her face in the painting shows that she processes intelligence with the quality of being wholesome that added to her person in the
portrait.
Mary Cassatt’s pose in her portrait is very similar to the one in Dubourg’s portrait that was painted at least fourteen years before Cassatt’s was started. What they both have in common is they lack the conventional what is feminine, grace and coquetry. They both share an almost same pose of their bodies that are lending forward with their hands clasp around something, either with Victoria her hands, Mary with cards. Mary Cassatt’s portrait she does not have the warmth that Victoria Dubourg’s has but includes her as being withdrawal.
Mary’s pose that was used by him was used in another painting from his early career, De Gas Pere Listening to Pagans that featured his father in the background, figure ten. Her pose is almost a direct copy of his father’s pose. By painting Mary in this pose; he was showing his high regard, affection for her. What set him from his fellow painters of the day; with painting women, was that he was not painting them as stereotypical feminine objects, but as human beings , but not mostly focusing on the fact if they had grace, beauty, and charm.
Even if he did this to the portraits; he was most of the times, the paintings were not popular with the people who sited for the paintings. Mary Cassatt; in 1912 wrote in a letter about her feelings about it,
“I don’t want to leave this portrait by Degas to my family as one of me. It has some qualities as a work of art but it is so painful and represents me as such repugnant person that I would not want anyone to know that I posed for it.”
Her feelings weren’t the only one expressed in such vivid words in letters or by actions. Edouard Manet; reportedly torn up the double portrait of him and his wife by Degas, figure fourteen. Degas; as an artist, was painting his portraits’ subjects as what they really looked like, but not by the conventions of the 19th century.
One of Degas’s peers that worked around the same time as him and was doing some of the same subjects was, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Some of the similar subjects like brothel, toilet and theater scenes. Lautrec was said to be inspired or taken cues from Degas monotypes of brothels from the 1870s. Lautrec like Degas doesn’t flatter the bodies of women in his paintings; example one of his work of art, Woman before a Mirror, figure seven. Both of these artists didn’t use clean lines and are overall not clean works of art. Degas did start out with using clean lines, paintings that were not reflections of his later works from 1869 onwards. However; unlike Degas, Lautrec doesn’t have to invent bodies or heads for his works of art that has prostitutes in them.
1/3 of Degas’s works of art consisted of females in them. Yes, he did treat the females in works of art differently but with some similarities. He did treat the women who were prostitutes in his works of art with them being treated as “types” rather than being treated as human beings like his female friends and family members. His treatment of the prostitutes was that how their body looked was based on the job field they were working in. The face value that it seems like he treats his female friends and family members better who are in his social circle; he paints them in a light that isn’t the most flattering.
The women, men wrote in letters and spoke to others about their portraits that he painted of them and what they didn’t like about them. He was compared to some of his peers in the art world with his views on women and how he portrayed them in his art. One of his peers that did similar subjects in his art works was his fellow Frenchman, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Overall; he was a different man, who had views of women that his peers in the art world and 19th century society didn’t held, and who was in a sense ahead of the game on how women were being perceived in art.