Franco-American

Of all the great masters of French 19th-Century painting, only one had U. S. blood in his veins, or ever visited and painted in the U. S. Last week the Pennsylvania Museum of Art gave that painter, Edgar Hilaire Germain Degas, the most comprehensive show of his works ever held in this country. Over 100 paintings, drawings and prints went on view; there were even a small bronze figure and four photographs taken by Degas. To make the show a success, the Louvre, greatest art museum in the world, magnanimously postponed its own projected Degas show, lent three important canvases. These with the rest of the borrowed works put something on the wall for every type of art lover. In portraits there was the sensitive picture of the artist's young brother, Achille, as a gold-laced aspirant in the French Navy. In sporting pictures there was the vividly painted False Start lent by John Hay ("Jock") Whitney. For print collectors there was the fine etching of Degas friend and pupil, Mary Cassatt in the Louvre. For balletomanes there were half a dozen pastel studies of the saucy, bandy-legged little dancing girls on which Degas fame chiefly rests.

Proud of their aristocratic background, Artist Degas' family always spelled the name De Gas. His half-Italian father was a moderately rich banker who went to Paris about the year 1800 to open a branch of the family's Neapolitan banking house. His mother (Adele Musson) was born in the U. S.; her brother Michel ran a cotton brokerage business in New Orleans. Edgar Degas started as a well-intentioned student. Ingres was his life-long ideal, but lessons from a pupil of a pupil of Ingres was as close as he could come.

His first paintings, large allegorical exercises in the manner of Delacroix, won him early recognition. In 1873, Painter Degas went to New Orleans to visit his uncle Michel and his two younger brothers, Rene and Achille, who were working there in the cotton house. Brother Edgar painted an excellent view of his relatives during office hours, which hung last week in Philadelphia's exhibition. Uncle Michel in his silk hat and frock coat sits in the foreground peering at a sample of cotton. Behind him brother Rene is sprawled in chair reading a newspaper, while customers finger samples and clerks tot up books. When the picture was painted, Louisiana had a Negro Acting Governor, P. B. Pinchback. The director of the little provincial museum at Pau in Southern France snapped up the cotton market picture for $200 when it was exhibited in 1876. It is valued today at about $75,000. The picture last attracted attention in Paris at the Colonial Exposition of 1931 where it was shown as a memento of France's lost colony, Louisiana.

Edgar Degas lived to be 83, grew to be as cantankerous as Whistler, morbidly jealous of the success of younger men, but in his younger days the suave and sociable Manet was one of his best friends. Because of this friendship Degas, already an established artist, showed his pictures in the famed first exhibition of the Impressionists in 1874, was infuriated for the rest of his life when critics continued to call him an Impressionist. Painting outdoors gave him a cold in the head. He could not understand the experiments with broken light of Monet and Pissarro. All Degas' famed sporting pictures were painted in his studio from rapid pencil sketches. Though one of the greatest of figure painters, he despised women. "Little rats" was his favorite term for the ballet dancers who posed for his great pastel studies, and he seemed to take a malicious delight in twisting them into uncomfortable postures.

"When you work for Degas," said one of the "rats" to Biographer Julius Meier-Graefe, "you can feel every bone in your body."'

Edgar Degas was practically blind the last years of his life, painted little after 1900. Honored by the world but avoiding it, he stalked about Montmartre in a long black circular cloak, on interminable walks that seemed to aid his kidney trouble. He died Sept. 27, 1917.

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