Details

Title

Landscape with Rocks

Artist/Maker

Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)

Date

1892

Medium

Pastel over monotype in oil colors on wove paper

Dimensions

10 1/8 x 13 9/16 inches

Credit

Purchase with High Museum of Art Enhancement Fund

Accession #

2000.200

Location

Currently not on view

Rustling orange grasses dabbed with touches of blue evoke the peaceful arrival of fall in the hills. Degas created this monotype, which combines printing and drawing, in the two years following a visit to Burgundy, France. He called it an “imaginary landscape,” as he created it from memory—a method he preferred over working directly from nature. Degas said, “It’s all very well to copy what one sees; it’s much better to draw what one can see only in one’s memory.… You reproduce nothing but that which has made an impression upon you, which is to say, the necessary.”