Degas and Photography

From Japan to Muybridge and beyond.

Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion, 1878, with a sketch by Degas of the second image

In 1872, photographer Eadweard Muybridge was hired to settle a bet: does a galloping horse ever have all four feet off the ground at once? Spoiler alert; yes, but painters - Degas included - had been getting this wrong for ages, showing a horse at full gallop with its front legs reaching forward and its back legs reaching back, like a rocking horse stretched mid-air. Muybridge’s cameras, in the famous 1878 sequence of Sallie Gardner at a gallop, proved everyone wrong in the other direction: yes, all four hooves do leave the ground, but tucked underneath the horse’s belly, not splayed front and back.

Above I’ve shown a surviving sheet showing how Degas sketched from Muybridge’s published plates, correcting himself against the photographic evidence.

By the late 1880s, once Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion had appeared in book form, Degas had reworked his own horse sculptures to match what the camera showed him.

Horse Trotting, the Feet Not Touching the Ground (Edgar Degas c1881-1890)

So Degas was clearly influenced by photography. But what about his cut-off compositions, that to my eyes today look very much like photographic framing?

Racehorses (Edgar Degas 1883)

These were made a long time before handheld cameras and the snapshot were actually possible, and despite my eyes wanting to tell me Degas was poring over a bunch of mini-lab prints spread out on a coffee table, the framing influence came mostly from Japan. Perhaps there was a touch of Muybridge in them with the frozen moment, but the compositions seem to be drawn from Ukiyo-e prints that had been coming to Paris in the late nineteenth century.

Utagawa Toyokuni (Japanese, 1769-1825), The Actors Ichikawa Yaozo III and Kataoka Nizaemon VII

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (Japanese, 1798-1861), Kuwana: Legend of the Sailor Tokuzo, c. 1844-45, woodblock print, 14-5/8 x 10-1/4 inches, oban format.

Hokusai, Hiroshige, full of flat planes of colour, asymmetric framing and figures cut off by the edge of the sheet. Degas was an enthusiastic collector of them and was recorded as expressing envy for the clarity he found in Japanese work.

Edgar Degas, France 1834–1917 / Trois danseuses a la classe de danse (Three dancers at a dance class) c.1888-90 / Oil on cardboard / 50.5 x 60.6cm

You can see this in his rehearsal-room and racetrack paintings with their high, oblique viewpoints, dancers half out of frame. There is the sense that in his work he caught a moment, and I guess this frozen moment in time is something that could have been brought across from the Muybridge photographs. (The Australian photographer Narelle Autio’s ballet rehearsal photographs have a very Degasian feel to them in my opinion. And the slight motion blur in hers highlight also the impossibility of Degas having seen this sort of photograph with the slow lenses and emulsions of the time.)

Narelle Autio, Handstand in the Hallway, 2001, from Ballet School, type C print, 33 x 50 cm, ed. of 25

It’s tempting to fold these two currents into one story - photography and Japan taught Western art to crop and tilt - but it seems much more accurate keep them separate. Muybridge corrected a fact Degas and showed time frozen, while Ukiyo-e offered a way of organising a picture he hadn’t previously considered. I’ve chosen Degas because to me he offers a really clear example of this - especially because his work often looks particularly photographic to me.

But I think what really happened is these two influences happened to come to the same painter in the same period of his work and push in a similar direction, which makes it easy, but inaccurate to conflate them.

Hockney, for what it’s worth, owned The Human Figure in Motion from a young age, and he’s said every art school had a copy. So the thread certainly doesn’t stop with Degas, and it’s probably more of a web than a continuous thread anyway. I’ve already written about Francis Bacon and Muybridge and I’m sure there’s lots more to come.