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Paperback – 145 x 115 mm – 112 pages

Forty colour illustrations

ISBN 9781843681748

This volume brings together ground-breaking 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.

Degas was a celebrity in Britain in his lifetime, thanks originally to George Moore’s pioneering essay, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. 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 amongst 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 influential – and the most humane – of the painters of the later 19th century.

Hitherto difficult to find, these essays are reprinted here with an introduction by Anna Gruetzner Robins, and are illustrated with forty-six pages of colour 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), of mixed Danish, German and English blood, became one of the most powerful followers of Degas in England, and an important link between Impressionism and Modernism. He also wrote much important art criticism.

Anna Gruetzner Robins was Professor of History of Art at the University of Reading. She co-curated Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris 1870-1910, 2005 and is the editor of Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art, 2000.