Shop art print and framed art Maisons au bord de la mer by Edgar Degas

Maisons au bord de la mer (Houses by the Sea) is a pastel by the French painter Edgar Degas, painted in 1869 and now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Despite his declared predilection for jockeys and dancers, Degas also devoted himself enthusiastically to painting landscapes, achieving quite fascinating results, as in the present Maisons au bord de la mer, in which the artist depicts the landscape of Étretat, the town where he stayed to visit his friend Manet, who lived in Boulogne. The work, which had been in the Louvre since 1959, was transferred to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986, where it is exhibited under the inventory number RF 31201. Maisons au bord de la mer openly declares the influence of the graphico-mémique technique of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a neoclassical master still revered by Degas in his youth. As several critics have observed, the landscape depicted in Houses by the Sea seems almost abstracted from reality, as if materialising through the fog of memories. This makes perfect sense in the light of Ingres's teachings to the young Degas, who suggested that he study nature and the Old Masters in depth, and then draw what he observed after some time in the studio, without a model in front of [...]

 

This artwork is a drawing from the classical period. It belongs to the impressionism style.

 

« Maisons au bord de la mer » is kept at Louvre, Paris, France.

 

Find the full description of Maisons au bord de la mer by Edgar Degas on Wikipedia.