Degas: The Painter of Modern Life Memories of Degas

Two essays remembering Degas by the most acute observers of the avant-garde art of their time "The one great French painter, perhaps one of the greatest artists the world has ever seen." Walter Sickert on Degas, 1889 This volume brings together groundbreaking and intensely personal memoirs of Degas, by George Moore, the first writer in English on Impressionism, and Walter Sickert, one of the finest English followers of Degas. Thanks originally to George Moore's pioneering essay "The Painter of Modern Life," Degas was a celebrity in Britain in his lifetime. When Degas died, Moore reprised the essay with some further recollections, in part as a riposte to the memoir published by Degas's great admirer and follower, Walter Sickert. Sickert's essay, sparkling, engaged, witty, and occasionally combative, is among the best of his writings. Together these memoirs represent some of the most vivid responses to Impressionism in English, as well as painting an intimate picture of arguably the most important and most influentialand the most humaneof the painters of the later 19th century. Hitherto difficult to find, these essays are illustrated with 30 pages of color plates covering the span of Degas's dazzling career.

George Moore (1852-1933) was an Irish writer of novels, poetry, plays, and art criticism. His first ambition was to be a painter, and he spent much of the 1870s in Paris, where he came to know many of the leading figures in art and literature. Walter Sickert (1860-1942) was an esteemed art critic. He became one of the most powerful followers of Degas in England, and an important link between Impressionism and Modernism. Anna Gruetzner Robins is is the coauthor of Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris 1870-1910 and the author of A Fragile Modernism.