A Degas Sketchbook

In 1995 the Getty Museum acquired a sketchbook by the prolific artist Edgar Degas (1834-1917). Its images, dating from approximately 1877, embrace a variety of themes from everyday Parisian life the café, concert, brothels, and ballet and were created during Degas's weekly visits to the home of writer Ludovic Halévy, the first owner of the sketchbook. They show Degas's remarkable powers of observation, as well as the sureness and economy of his line.

Reproduced here are twenty-eight pages from the sketchbook, along with a brilliant essay that places Degas within the contexts of both the cultivated salon of the Halévy family and the larger world of late-nineteenth-century Paris, which the notoriously difficult artist both celebrated and shunned. In addition, the book features a transcript of a lively conversation about the sketchbook among artist David Hockney, Getty Museum director John Walsh, and Lee Hendrix, curator of drawings for the Getty Museum.