Provenance

David W.T. Cargill

Scottish, 1872 - 1939

Explore Selected Works

A young and older man, both with pale skin, stand next to each other in shadowy room looking at a piece of white paper held by the older man in this vertical painting. Light from the upper left falls across the men, and they take up most of the height of the composition. The paper is held by a balding, elderly man at the center of the painting. He wears a knee-length, dark brown jacket and trousers. His has a gray beard and hair, and thin black lines delineate his brows and trace the creases on his face. A younger man standing to our left has short black hair and ruddy skin. He tilts his head to gaze at the paper in the older man’s hands. The younger man wears a sage-green jacket, and his lower body is partially hidden by a wooden rack before him. The V-shaped rack supports an open, dark green portfolio folder, and the young man rests his hands on the edges of more sheets of paper there. There are two paintings hanging on the olive-green wall of the room to each side of the men, but they are loosely painted and deep in shadow, so the subjects are difficult to make out. Another aquamarine-blue folder rests against a red bed or sofa that runs along the back wall. A white, folded cloth sits on the sofa above the portfolio. The artist signed the lower left, “h. Daumier.”
Honoré Daumier, Advice to a Young Artist, 1865/1868, oil on canvas, Gift of Duncan Phillips, 1941.6.1

Advice to a Young Artist

Honoré Daumier · 1865/1868 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1941.6.1

We look slightly down onto a loosely painted scene with three ballerinas in rose-pink costumes and one man, wearing a black suit and top hat, against a backdrop made up of dabs and strokes of lime, mint, and pine green in this vertical painting. The people all appear to have light skin. The most defined person is the woman closest to us, shown from the knees up to the right of center. Her body is angled to our left, and her profile faces that direction. Dark eyelashes suggest her eyes are closed. She has a pointed nose, and her red lips are closed. Dark brown hair is pulled up into a large bun with a coral-pink flower tucked in at the back of her head. She grips opposite elbows at her waist, her arms close to her body. Her pink costume has a low-cut bodice with loops low over her shoulders and a flaring, knee-length tutu. She wears a black choker tied with a bow at the back of her neck and two black bands encircle her wrists. A touch of white at the ear we can see suggests a gold earring. To our right and cut off by the right edge of the painting, a man stands beyond the woman’s shoulder, in shadow as he looks onto the scene. His face is painted with taupe-gray strokes. His suit and top hat are black except for a narrow white collar at his neck. Beyond this pair and seen from the chest up between them, another woman in the same pink costume faces our right. A short distance from us to our left, a third ballerina stands facing away from us. The elephant-gray floor she stands on visually creates a vertical band up the left side of the composition. The rest of the space behind and around the man and dancers is painted loosely with shades of vibrant to muted greens, with a few dabs of pale pink. The painting has a narrow sand-brown border. The artist signed the work by incising into the green paint in the upper right corner, “Degas.”
Edgar Degas, Dancers Backstage, 1876/1883, oil on canvas, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection, 1970.17.25

Dancers Backstage

Edgar Degas · 1876/1883 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1970.17.25

Bibliography

2002

  • Fowles, Frances in Millet to Matisse: Nineteenth- and Twentieth- Century French Painting from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow. Exh. cat, 2002: 200