Degas, Cassatt, Pissarro and the Making and Marketing of the Belle Epreuve

Abstract

Focusing on the prints of Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt and Camille Pissarro, my dissertation explores the development of the belle épreuve, or the fine print, in relation to the Impressionist movement. I firstly consider the commercial tactics of the Impressionists in the face of the evolution of the modern art market and the decreasing relevancy of the Salon and expound on previous scholarship by demonstrating how the Impressionists' modes of presentation proved especially conducive to showcasing works on paper and how we might apply observations about the speculative nature of the Impressionists' formal innovations to their prints. Additionally I highlight contemporaneous observations about the heterogeneity of the Impressionist exhibitions that reveal meaningful insights into the nineteenth-century perception of the artists' relationships to each other, thus questioning the tendency to divide the exhibitors into two groups, the Degas-led realists and the Monet-led colorists. Then I consider the printmaking practices of Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro individually, elucidating how each artist's attitudes toward work, craft and business manifest formally in a small selection of examples from their printed oeuvres intended for exhibition or publication. Among the core members of the Impressionist group, Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro represented those most enamored with printmaking, even collaborating to create prints for a never-realized journal during the winter and spring of 1879 and 1880. I posit that the artists' shared compulsions for regular work, fascination with artistic processes, technical flexibility and curiosity and forward-thinking disregard for the traditional hierarchy accorded to media rendered them particularly suited for making rarified, laborious prints. A final factor that connects Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro is that all three artists had complicated relationships with the business of art or the need to sell. The dichotomy of art making versus art marketing manifested itself in their prints. While printmaking as a process implies multiple pulls of an original image for commercial reasons, by emphasizing handicraft through idiosyncratic techniques, Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro accentuated the artistry and labor of their prints. Because of the complicatedness of their practices, printmaking did not turn out to be particularly lucrative for any of them, yet the artists' efforts correlate to a concurrent vogue for intimate exhibitions and works, in terms of both size and technique, and Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro seemingly undertook printmaking with the progressive clientele already established for Impressionism in mind. I thusly connect my discussions of biography and personality to a consideration of Impressionism's relationship to the changing art market of the late nineteenth century, in which facture, as a record of artistic temperament, became a sought-after commodity for collectors of avant-garde art. Despite superficial differences with regard to their subject matter and approaches, an examination of Degas, Cassatt and Pissarro's printmaking practices reveals the assumed draftsmen and the colorists of the New Painting as kindred spirits, for whom the how of art-making proved just as significant as the what and for whom marketing was important but making was vital. The artists' uses of combinations of etching, softground, drypoint and aquatint demonstrates concerns for both design and tone, and each artist accordingly strove to achieve in their prints a balance of personal sensations and decorative artifice.