What a strange painting this is. Not a portrait as much as a still life: the daughter being wholly defined by the father, even in his absence; he was travelling in Venice at the time. Henri Rouart was a wealthy industrialist and an active member of the Impressionist circle of artists. He exhibited 103 of his paintings in seven out of eight of the Impressionist exhibitions, between 1874 and 1886, the year this painting, Helene Rouart in her Father’s Study, was completed by Edgas Degas. Henri loved to travel and collect art. He bought many of his fellow Impressionists’ work, championing their artistic innovations and helping them financially through lean times. He was close friends and a fellow serviceman of Degas, who, unmarried, regarded the Rouarts as the closest he had to family and regularly dined with them ‘en famille’. A fellow guest recalled, “Every Friday night, the faithful Degas, sparkling and unbearable, enlivens the dinner table at M Rouart’s. He spreads wit, terror, gaiety…. His host, who adored him, used to listen with admiration and indulgence”.*
The portrait of Helene, was one of Degas’ last major portraits but not his first of his friend’s daughter. He had painted her in the previous decade, as a child sitting in her father’s lap. Degas painted portraits throughout his career, but never as commissions. Thus, his sitters were all drawn from his family, friends and associates. They are shown mostly in repose and contemplation, discreet and dignified, never showing off. Helene was born in 1863 and had a pale complexion and red hair, a colouring Degas found striking. From the earliest sketches relating to this portrait, Degas seems to have been determined to make reference to his friend’s extensive collection of cultural artefacts. The Rouart’s Parisian home near the Parc Monceau was, according to contemporary photographs, stacked high with Henri’s collections. Here, as an adult, Helene stands behind her father’s empty chair - a chair which still belongs to the Rouart family.
The motif of an empty chair, suggestive of the absence of a loved one, has a long artistic pedigree. In 1859, Degas visited Genoa, where he saw an exhibition of portraits by the 17th century’s celebrated portraitist, Anthony Van Dyck, and made a sketch of one of them, of Paolina Adorno. Degas wrote that “no-one has ever rendered the grace and refinement of woman the way Van Dyck has”. It is entirely characteristic of Degas to have reworked a motif long established in art history for his own means, perhaps here to capture some of that grace and refinement for Helene.
The choice of blue for the daughter’s dress may also be a nod to another painting, one in her father’s collection, by Corot - an artist both men admired. In La Dame en Bleu, we see another pensive young woman, leaning on a piece of furniture, with two landscapes by Corot on the wall behind her.
This device of placing pictures within a picture goes back to the Renaissance, identifying the subject of a portrait with their cultural credentials. Behind Helene is a view of Naples by Corot. Degas’ family were Neapolitan and he frequently visited the city and had sketched the same scene - most pertinently in January 1886, the same year as this painting.
The traditional reading of this portrait is that Helene is ‘hemmed in’, suffocated almost, by the physical and psychological weight of her father’s possessions. I am not so sure I agree. Helene was well known to Degas; she looks distant, definitely, but also proud and composed, not under any obligation to pretend or indulge the painter. 1886 was the year of her marriage to the engineer Eugene Marin, which was, by all accounts, a happy one which produced three children, but also the year of Helene’s mother’s death in July. Is it possible that this is what is occupying Helene’s thoughts as she lingers in her father’s study, awaiting his return?
I have always admired and enjoyed the roguishness of William Hogarth, What a thorn in the side of the establishment he was! 18th century England’s equivalent of a Cold War Steve; never afraid to ridicule and skewer the absurdities of the age. In Marriage a la Mode, his most famous and perhaps most accomplished Modern Moral Subject, he takes on high society in all its layers of hypocrisy and deceit. The impetus for art to express new views on morality and to have a useful function has its basis in the theories and writings of Locke and Shaftesbury, both of whom recognised art as a cultural force for good. Contemporary essays in The Spectator and later, Tatler, by their founders, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, disseminated ideas on the foundation of happiness and virtue in a sound moral education. In The Spectator in 1712, Steele defended prostitutes as victims of the moral vacuum to be found in large towns and high society. Again, in Tatler, Steele insisted that marriage should be based, if not wholly on love, then on family feeling and mutual respect.
In the second plate of Hogarth’s great series, the newly weds - brought together in the previous plate as a result of a financial settlement between their fathers, rather than any common bonds felt by the couple - are seen at home. Or might that be the space they jointly inhabit, as there is nothing homely about this elaborate but soulless interior? Husband and wife have spent the night before apart. He with his mistress, whose nightcap in his pocket is being inspected by the dog. She, entertaining at home, from the state of dishevelment which the room reveals. The chair, prominently overturned, possibly as a result of a hasty retreat by her lover, stands as an emblem of the household’s physical and moral collapse. So, too, do the candles burnt out on the mantlepiece.
The long-suffering steward raises his hand in exasperation at the bills which are, and will continue to go, unpaid. The lack of decency and decorum is shown not only in the attire of the couple - a lady’s morning coat would never be worn in front of servants - but also in their scandalous sense of interior design. Three full-length paintings of saints hang adjacent to a semi-pornographic reclining nude(s?), so erotic that it has to be covered up with a curtain. The fate of both these young people is doomed from the very first time we see them, shackled together like the two dogs in the same room. The next time Hogarth shows the couple together, the husband is dying, the wife soon to follow him in the next scene. Hogarth, like his literary comrade-in-arms, Henry Fielding, was keenly aware of the world around him, and through his often savage satirical expositions of society’s weaknesses sought to provide a type of instruction manual for how not to live.
Doris Salcedo is a Colombian artist who creates ambitious and powerful installations, often on a vast scale but always in a way that seeks to honour the individual. She provokes memories and memorialises loss, seeking to elicit a dialogue with the public and provide an impetus to ask difficult questions. A common theme in her work is a refusal to act as though violence or injustice has not happened, is not happening.
At the 8th International Biennale in Istanbul in 2003, Salcedo created her exhibit, Untitled, in the void between two buildings in an area of the city marked by the displacement of Jews and Greeks over the previous 100 years. Salcedo stacked 1,550 wooden chairs which meld together to create a flat surface with no protrusions. They can only be seen once close up to their position on the street.
The colours, textures and forms of the chairs are all assembled with care, as if embodying the lives they once accommodated. The chairs sit quietly amongst the adjacent buildings, their form familiar, their treatment very strange. This sophisticated, laborious and meticulously crafted response reminds us that we are all responsible for each other. That aggression by the state against the individual is rational, devised with coldness but its result is chaotic, organic and painful. Salcedo is influenced by the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, who questioned the accepted privilege of one thing over another to the neglect of the lesser part of the equation. For Derrida, the craving for neat solutions to life’s great questions and problems lies at the root of our reluctance to compromise and see the other side. Derrida knew what is was like to be marginalised, dismissed as ‘other’, and in this exhibit, Salcedo, too, asks what might be of value in the things we too easily overlook. Like the vacant chair in Degas’ portrait, the absence of those that are loved is felt in Salcedo’s poignant and arresting orchestration of these everyday objects.
*Paul Valery - ‘Degas, Danse, Dessin’ Pub. Gallimard 2017
Image credits
Edgas Degas - Helene Rouart in her Father’s Study, 1886, National Gallery, London
Anthony Van Dyck - Paolina Adorno Brignole-Sale, 1627, Palazzo Rosso, Genoa
Corot - La Dame en Blue, 1874, Louvre, Paris
William Hogarth - Marriage a la Made, Plate 2, various examples extant
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