Pathway in a Field, 1890
Pastel over monotype in oil colors, 11 13/16 x 15 9/16 in. (30 x 39.5 cm)
Katharine Ordway Fund
1985.34.1
Between 1890 and 1892 Edgar Degas made more than fifty landscape monotypes, most executed during his visit in October 1890 to his friend Pierre-Georges Jeanniot in the village of Diénay, north of Dijon. In an account published many years later, Jeanniot described Degas at work: ". . . little by little one saw emerging on the metal surface a valley, a sky, white houses, fruit trees . . . clouds scudding across an animated sky, above the red and green earth. . . . Then, he would ask for some pastel to finish the monotypes, and it was there, even more than in the making of the proof, that I admired his taste, his imagination, and the freshness of his recollections." Though not the inventor of the monotype process (Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione and William Blake, among others, had explored the medium before him), Degas was certainly its greatest proponent and practitioner in the nineteenth century.
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