Landscape with Smokestacks
c. 1890
Medium
Pastel, over monotype, on textured cream wove paper, edge-mounted on board
Dimensions
31.7 × 41.6 cm (12 1/2 × 16 7/16 in.)
Classification
pastel
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
151507
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Degas is best known for his images of the ballet and other scenes from modern urban life. However, periodically he explored the landscape genre, with a trip in 1869 to the Normandy Coast, for example, that resulted in a number of pastel landscapes. During the peak years of Impressionism-the 1870s and 1880s, when landscape reigned supreme among France's avant-garde-Degas was notoriously averse to the practice of open-air landscape painting. Yet in the 1890s, he produced several groups of landscap...
About the Artist
Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas · 1834–1917
Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas, born on July 19, 1834, in Paris to a prosperous banking family, was the eldest of five children. His mother, Célestine Musson, a Creole from New Orleans whose father Germain Musson had roots in Haiti, died when Degas was thirteen, leaving his father Augustin and unmarried uncles to guide him. Educated at the elite Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he earned a baccalauréat in...