26 August 2026
National Gallery with Toby today, so many lovely moments. But perhaps none more edifying for me than standing with him in front of Degas's Hélène Rouart in her Father's Study (1886). He re-oriented my view on the work and Degas more generally.
For whatever reason, I suppose based on the selected reading I've done and my relatively limited knowledge of his oeuvre, I've always had it in my head that Degas was the generally prettier and more accessible one in relation to Manet. But Toby is quite attuned to his idiosyncrasies, the games he may have been playing within each of his works, and the beautifully confounding logic of his painterly choices. Talk of “incidents and accidents” around recording, of resistance decoding while observing, of the work's relationship to provisionality.
It really is a strange, askew painting. Framings abound, (the edge of the red silk wall-hanging, the glass case containing Egyptian statues, the back of the chair, the literal frame around Corot’s Castel dell’Ovo in Naples), that all collapse and compress into flatness despite suggesting a network of different spatial planes. The glass case in particular becomes a portal, like an open door to a hallway into and through the left side of the composition. And those precarious, gummed up stacks of paper at the bottom left resting on a maroon blob of a surface-table-floor. Green-blue-gray-orange-yellow-pink held together by a few suggestions of edge; the incident. Perhaps not unlike the disheveled spread at the bottom left of Le Déjeuner, actually.