The Impressionist Who Hated Plein-Air : Degas’s War on Nature and the Impressionist Schism
- Art d'Histoire
- Feb 18
- 4 min read
"No art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament . . . I know nothing."
In he pantheon of Impressionism, Edgar Degas stands as a solitary, often prickly figure who fits the label only uneasily. While his peers Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir chased the fleeting light of the sun across rivers and fields, Degas shut the door to the outside world. He was a painter who preferred the gaslight of the studio to the noon sun, and the discipline of memory to the tyranny of nature. To understand Degas is to understand a man who built his revolution on the foundations of the Renaissance, treating his radical modernism with the rigour of an old master.
The Privileged Apprentice
Unlike many of his struggling contemporaries, Degas’s entry into the art world was paved with gold. Born into a wealthy banking family with branches in Naples and Paris, he was supported by his father, Auguste de Gas, a man of taste who encouraged his son to abandon the "flabby" drawing of the schools and find his own path. In 1858, after receiving a shipment of his son's work, Auguste wrote to Edgar predicting that he would achieve great things if he continued on his current track.
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Sheet of Studies and Sketches, 1858
This financial security allowed Degas to undertake a formidable artistic training in Italy. Between 1856 and 1859, he travelled through Naples, Rome, and Florence, to copy the masters with obsessive dedication. In Rome, he formed a "merry society" called the Caldarrosti (roasted chestnuts) with other young fellow artists like Gustave Moreau and Georges Bizet, debating art at the Café Greco. Yet, even amidst the scenic beauty of Italy, Degas confessed to feeling bored when contemplating nature, preferring the intellectual rigour of the museum to the chaos of the landscape.
The Tyrant of Line
Degas’s aesthetic philosophy was profoundly shaped by a youthful encounter with the great Neoclassical master, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Arranged by a family friend, this meeting resulted in a piece of advice that became Degas’s mantra. As recounted in the story of Ingres's advice to Degas, the master told the young artist to "draw lines, many lines," whether from memory or nature. However, in later retellings, Degas significantly altered this memory, claiming Ingres had forbidden him from working from nature entirely, insisting solely on memory and engravings.
This allegiance to line and tradition set Degas apart from the Impressionists who dissolved form into colour. He proudly adopted Ingres’s retort, "Sir, I have several brushes," to deflect criticism of his own work. His devotion was such that he posed for a photograph entitled The Apotheosis of Degas, a parody of Ingres’s famous Apotheosis of Homer, signalling a declaration of aesthetic loyalty that prioritised the constructed image over the captured moment.
The Enemy of the Open Air
While Monet and Pissarro set up their easels in fields, Degas developed a visceral hostility towards plein air painting. He viewed the practice of painting outdoors as a mindless sport, famously remarking that he wished he had a despot’s power to shoot down the "harmful vermin" who cluttered the landscape with their white canvases. For Degas, the disdain for plein air was a matter of intellectual integrity; he believed that art should be a transformation where imagination collaborates with memory, rather than a servile copy of a farm or a garden.
Degas went to great lengths to demystify the romanticism of landscape painting. He boasted that he could paint all the landscapes in the world using "herb soup" and three old brushes. When he did exhibit landscapes, such as his 1892 series, he revealed that they were actually painted from memory based on glimpses caught through a train window, or constructed in the studio using piles of coal from his stove to simulate rocks. By liberating himself from the "tyranny of nature," Degas argued that the artist reproduces only what is necessary, condensing the world into a more potent reality.
The Schism of 1881
Degas’s combative personality and divergent aesthetic eventually tore the Impressionist group apart. By 1881, a deep rift had formed between the "Pure Impressionists" led by Caillebotte and Monet, and the "Realists" championed by Degas. The conflict erupted over the sixth Impressionist exhibition. Gustave Caillebotte, writing in frustration to Camille Pissarro, complained that the quarrel was caused by Degas’s "badly made" character and his insistence on including realists like Raffaëlli while driving away the core talents of the group.
Caillebotte accused Degas of being a bitter man obsessed with persecution, who sowed disorganisation among them. He argued that Degas’s refusal to acknowledge the need of Renoir and Monet to also exhinit at the Salon —while promoting his own circle of "little beasts"—was destroying the artistic unity of the movement. Ultimately, Caillebotte withdrew, leaving Degas to dominate the 1881 exhibition and proving that the artist, who painted with Ingres's discipline and against plein air painting, was also at the helm of the Impressionist movement.
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