Volume 33, Number 5 · March 27, 1986
What's in a Portrait?
By Francis Haskell
Degas: His Life, Times, and Work
by Roy McMullen
Houghton Mifflin, 517 pp., $29.95
Pompeo Batoni Introductory Text edited and prepared for publication by
by Anthony Clark, A Complete Catalog of His Works with an Edgar Peters Bowron
New York University Press, 416 pp., $125.00
Reynolds Weidenfeld and Nicolson, (to be published by Abrams in the fall)
edited by Nicholas Penny
Royal Academy of Arts, London, published in association with, 408 pp., £20.00
It was probably in the second half of 1860 that Degas, who was then aged twenty-six, completed in Paris his large portrait group of the Bellelli family (Louvre)—the largest such group, indeed one of the two largest pictures, he ever painted. But despite many beautiful preliminary drawings and many references in letters, we know little about the precise circumstances of the composition, and in his biography of the artist the late Roy McMullen tells us that its subsequent fate is even more mysterious than its origins: it is, in fact, a fate probably without parallel in the history of nineteenth-century art. The picture did not, apparently, become accessible to the public until the sale that followed Degas's death in 1917, at which date it was found rolled up in his studio; in the nearly sixty intervening years there is no certain record of anyone's having seen it or having commented on its existence. Even its where-abouts remain unknown, for it may have been delivered to the family and then returned to Degas at some later stage, or it may never have left the artist's possession.[1]
Review, 3237 words
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