A Degas Sketchbook

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by Carol Armstrong and David Hockney

Getty Trust Publications

Due/Published August 2000, 111 pages, cloth

ISBN 0892366109

In 1995 the Getty Museum acquired a sketchbook (ca. 1877) by the prolific artist Edgar Degas (1834-1917). Its images 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 Hal�vy, 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 Hal�vy 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 postscript by artist David Hockney, in which he discusses the creation of the sketchbook.