An Impressive Provenance: The American painter Mary Cassatt (1912), who owned this fan, called it “the most beautiful one that Degas painted.”[1] The fan mount is depicted hanging on the wall above Cassatt's flowered chintz armchair in her
Portrait of Madame J. of 1879 or 1880 (see fig. 1 above). The framed fan also appears above Cassatt in photographs of her at home in Paris taken by her friend the architect Theodate Pope Riddle in 1903 (fig. 2) (see also Hirshler and Davis 2014). As demonstrated by both Cassatt’s painting and the photographs, fan mounts like this one were intended to be displayed like works of art as opposed to being used functionally. Cassatt’s ownership of the fan is believed to date from as early as 1879, the year of its creation and its first showing at the fourth Impressionist exhibition. (For more on Degas’s and other artists’ fans at the 1879 exhibition, see the catalogue entry for Degas’s
Fan Mount: The Ballet [
29.100.554], also exhibited at the fourth Impressionist exhibition.) Degas and Cassatt were great friends, and the fan is thought to have been a gift to Cassatt from Degas. Cassatt continued to own the work until at least 1917, when she offered it along with two other paintings by Degas in The Met’s collection (
29.100.41 and
29.100.183) for twenty thousand dollars to her close friend Louisine Havemeyer in a letter (Cassatt 1917). The fan was shipped to Havemeyer by 1919 through the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and stayed in her collection for the next decade until her 1929 bequest to The Met.
The Fan Mount: What makes this particular fan mount stand out among the twenty-seven or more fans produced by Degas is the vast open space against which the ballet dancers appear at its curved base. Two dancers at left sit or sprawl in relaxed poses, the right figure of the two propping her head on her left hand with index finger aloft and elbow to the ground. At right, another dancer appears to raise her tutu in preparation to enter the stage proper from the wings. Each of the three dancers wears a black ribbon tied in a bow behind the neck and a decorative braided hairstyle. The furthest left dancer’s hair includes a small light blue floral flourish at the top. The dancers’ costumes and hair styles here are very much like those found in a painting Degas completed five years before,
The Dance Class (The Met,
1987.47.1). In that work, we can see that the black ribbons are actually black-ribboned chokers with lockets. However, any particular related performance is unknown, and, as in the earlier painting, the subject is likely to be an invented one based on extended observation. (On this point, see the catalogue entry for
The Dance Class.) The artist skillfully used the reserve of the cream-colored silk fabric in the parts of the dancers’ faces, arms, and backs to be depicted as most struck by strong stagelight, and to highlight the luminous quality of the blond-toned wig of the dancer second from left.[2] Silver-toned paint, now impacted by flaking and losses (see fig. 2 for its earlier appearance), represents sections of stage flats at top center, bottom left, and right; below these, the vast open area freely painted with thin washes of black watercolor creates a sense of spatial ambiguity.
Two other fans of the same period provide salient comparisons. One is Degas’s
Dancers (Fan Design) (fig. 3), which is taller overall and more colorful, but features a very similar treatment of space and, similarly, few ballet dancers are depicted. Here, stage flats overtake much of the empty space, and the dancers, in varied positions, await their entrance cue from among the flats. Like those in The Met’s fan, they are huddled together to one side of the composition, contrasted to the surrounding void. Asymmetry dominates both The Met’s and Baltimore’s fans. Of the asymmetrical designs in Degas’s curved fan mount surfaces, Kimberly Jones (2019, p. 249) noted, “While Degas had explored asymmetry before, his compositions become even more audacious in response to this irregular format.”
Fan: Dancers on the Stage (fig. 4) is a more symmetrical but compositionally related fan whose background is more delineated through color washes and pastel. This fan repeats both the use of a vast open space and the two dancers at left in The Met’s fan. Another pair of dancers facing away from the viewer, again with black ribbons down their backs, join the left grouping; only the left dancer of these two seems related to the dancer at right in The Met’s fan.
As with
Fan Mount: The Ballet, the media for
Fan Mount: Dancers includes metallic paints, found only in this period of Degas’s production and, traditionally, a medium of commercial decorators and amateur artists that, in the context of the fan format, recalls precedents in Japanese art and design (Jones 2019, p. 249, and see below). Hoenigswald and Jones (2014) have noted that oxidation has caused the metallic tones to darken, and that the instability of the medium may have been the reason for the artist’s quick abandonment of metallic paints.
Japonisme in Degas’s Fans: Ives (1997) remarked, “in none of his canvases does the artist break so openly with Western tradition to re-create the stylized abstraction of Japanese design” as with his fans. Nakatani (1988) and DeVonyar and Kendall (2007) specifically compared the execution of this striking fan to a painting demonstration by the Japanese artist Watanabe Seitei (1851–1918), which Degas witnessed the year before taking up his own brushes to create this fan. The Japanese master created a similarly hazy effect with a light touch, using techniques of blurring, staining, and dripping in ink painting. Nakatani also compared Degas’s technique to that of Tawaraya Sotatsu’s (ca. 1570–ca. 1640) early seventeenth-century ink paintings. The palette of
Fan Mount: Dancers has been compared by several scholars to that of traditional Japanese lacquer work (though the palette has changed some with age and oxidation). As with
Fan Mount: The Ballet, the artist has embraced a bird’s eye view, a device taken from Japanese and Chinese paintings, in presenting the image as if from an onstage box. Finally, the asymmetrical space of the fan has been compared to the flat ground of Japanese and Chinese ink painting (Nakatani 1988). (For more information about Degas’s fans and
Japonisme, see the section of the same title in the catalogue entry for
Fan Mount: The Ballet [29.100.554].)
The Source of a Joke at the 4th Impressionist exhibition?: Draner’s cartoon
Chez MM Les Peintres Independants (fig. 5) could well represent
Fan Mount: Dancers. Below the fan depicted as one with a rather abstract wide open space with but scribbles of humans added, a top-hatted man points to the fan and turns to his female companion to say, “But this fan does not represent anything at all!,” to which the woman replies, “Yes, but . . . and the signature?” (“Mais cet éventail ne represente rien du tout! / Eh bien! mais . . . et la signature?”) While expressing the confusion many felt in looking at a work so inherently different from traditional Western compositional methods, the cartoon also betrays the role of the bourgeoisie in clamoring to collect
Japoniste art and design; if a work were signed by the artist, all the better for their pocketbooks. The Met’s fan is, indeed, signed by Degas—not once but twice—(at center top right and at the middle of the right edge), and, while that may well have added some appeal at the fourth Impressionist exhibition, the work landed in the hands of his dear fellow artist Mary Cassatt soon thereafter.
Jane R. Becker 2023
[1] Cassatt stated this in a letter to the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel from late 1912 in which she proposed his selling the fan, as those in her family would not appreciate the work. At that time, she estimated its value at twenty-five thousand francs. A few months later, in a March 1913 letter to him, she revised her estimate, stating that perhaps she had had too great expectations for the fan, whose price she had based on that of a fan sold at Alexis Rouart’s collection sale, for which she recalled the price as sixteen thousand francs (before fees). See Cassatt 1912 and 1913. As my colleague and scholar of Cassatt Laura Corey elucidated for me (June 12, 2023 conversation), though, Cassatt’s selling off of a great deal of her collection in this period was not an indication that she did not like particular works; rather, with failing eyesight in 1912, she had decided to step back from painting, advising collectors, and collecting and was interested in finding suitable homes for her works.
[2] I am grateful to my colleague Marjorie Shelley for sharing this observation with me.
