Abstract

In art-historical literature, French nineteenth-century painters Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas are often portrayed as high-bourgeois artists, close in class allegiance and urbanity. 1 However, they were two very different kinds of bourgeois and they went about their art in very different ways. Manet wanted and could afford to remain alone in his heroic struggle for success, promoting himself as a solitary genius, or “temperament,” as Zola called it. 2 Degas, instead, was a bohemian almost all his life, working within the rebellious Parisian culture of solidarity among artists. During the 1860s Degas had to paint friends for free to build up a reputation as a painter. In the post-Commune years up to 1886 Degas was one of the chief organisers of the independent exhibitions held since 1874 by the Impressionists on the boulevard des Italiens. In this paper I will explore the implications of Degas‟ engagement in the Impressionist societies and in the collaborative printmaking practised by Degas, Camille Pissarro, Ludovic Lepic, Félix Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt as a tool for their self-fashioning as Northern painters-printmakers in the seditious Montmartre of the last quarter of the nineteenth century