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Among the French artists of the
period whose debt to caricature is established is Edgar Degas. As a
young art student, Degas waited in eager anticipation of each new
edition of Le Charivari for its Daumier cartoons. He
collected the prints of Honoré Daumier, Paul Gavarni, and the
eighteenth-century British caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson, and he
followed the progress of contemporary British cartoonists like Charles
Keene and his friend Carlo Pellegrini, whose work appeared in Vanity
Fair under the signature "Ape." Since his own
productions including monotype prints often verging on caricature,
Degas searchingly looked to gifted graphic artists—including
Japanese ukiyo-e printmakers—for such traits as physical and
physiognomic distortion and exaggeration, unconventional poses,
unpredictable settings, bold silhouetting, and the abrupt cropping of
the human form for pungent visual effects. |
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Degas became attracted to
Thomas Nast’s work, and while there is no documentary support of
this assertion, I believe that the visual evidence is
incontestable. Degas probably encountered Nast’s work for the
first time when he visited his relatives in the United States in
1872, but he may have been already familiar with it from reading Le
Monde illustré or flipping through the omnipresent Harper’s
Weekly. Degas may also have known of Nast through the
mediation of Pellegrini. Both Pellegrini and Nast joined Garibaldi
for the siege of Capua, and the two reportorial illustrators must
have met at that time. The British, moreover, responded very
favorably to Nast’s work of the 1870s, and in 1872 Vanity
Fair commissioned him to execute a series of caricatures
of outstanding American statesmen. During the run of the series,
Nast was compared to ‘Ape’ for better and for worse, and the
result was unanticipated publicity for the American on both sides
of the Atlantic. In any case, it is likely that Degas learned of
Nast when he stopped briefly in New York en route to New Orleans
in the autumn of 1872, or during his long stay in the Southern
city. At that moment Nast was being celebrated nationwide for his
triumphant victory over the Tweed ring. |
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Albert I. Boime
Professor of Art History at UCLA |
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