Discovering Degas: Collecting in the Age of Sir William Burrell

A beautifully illustrated study of the works by Edgar Degas in the Burrell Collection, Glasgow.

In 1874 the first Impressionist exhibition opened in Paris, shocking the art world with a radical new style of painting. Capturing contemporary subjects and everyday life, the ’Impressionist’ artists were fascinated by the way light, colour and shape constantly change. But frequent rejection by the Paris Salon jury led some, including Edgar Degas, to look to Britain for a more receptive audience.

This richly illustrated book explores the influence of London-based dealers such as Ernest Gambart and Charles Deschamps, and Glasgow-based dealer Alex Reid, who saw the market for French art in Britain, encouraging an early following among British collectors for artists such as Monet, Pissarro, Manet and Degas.

William Burrell’s first opportunity to see Degas’s work on public display in Scotland was at the 1888 International Exhibition in Glasgow. Over a 40-year period Burrell collected more than 20 of Degas’s works, far more than any other UK collector, before he and his wife Constance donated their entire collection to the City of Glasgow. This book accompanies a major exhibition at the Burrell Collection, in which all of Burrell’s Degas pictures are displayed together for the first time, along with important works from national and international collections.

Detailed catalogue entries look at the artist’s talent for capturing subjects such as the ballet, racehorses, and women bathing and dressing, giving a greater insight into why British collectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries purchased these enduringly appealing works. This is also an important opportunity to understand Degas in his entirety, both as a brilliant artist and as a man whose opinions and ideas would not go unchallenged today.

Frances Fowle is Chair of Nineteenth-Century Art, University of Edinburgh, UK and Senior Curator, National Galleries of Scotland, UK. She is a co-founder and board member at TIAMSA. Her previous publications include Van Gogh’s Twin: The Scottish Art Dealer Alexander Reid (2010) and Globalising Impressionism: Reception, Translation and Transnationalism (2020).