An Investigation of a Self-Portrait by Edgar Degas

Getty Museum Associate Conservator of Paintings Devi Ormond was walking through the galleries one day when she noticed that the surface of Edgar Degas’s Self-Portrait looked slightly strange. The portrait is a small work (around eight by six inches), painted about 1857–58, when the artist was in his early 20s.

The composition’s small size invites close viewing. As Ormond examined Degas’s face, she noted a blanched, whitish surface in the varnish layer. “It was quite disturbing, particularly for such an intimate little portrait,” Ormond remembers.

After speaking with Senior Conservator of Paintings Ulrich Birkmaier, they decided to take the work off the wall and move it to the conservation studio. Ormond could then further investigate what was causing this blanched, cloudy material and try to improve the surface appearance of the painting. The project led her down a Degas rabbit hole, looking into the artist’s numerous early self-portraits, most of which were painted on paper. She was curious why the artist created so many of them.

An experimental artist

When Degas made this self-portrait, he was a young artist—he had traveled from Paris to Italy, like so many creatives before him, copying works by Italian Old Masters while at the same time experimenting with his own artistic style.

As she researched this area of Degas’s oeuvre at the Getty Research Institute library, Ormond noticed he painted many self-portraits during his early career as an artist, each one in an individual style. “I have a sense that he was using these studies to experiment with paint application using a variety of techniques. It appears that he was exploring the spatial relationship between the face and the background within the dimensions of the support,” Ormond points out. “There are many subtle differences among these self-portraits, which makes them really interesting as early studies in both oil paint and engravings.”

Other clues suggest that Getty’s painting was meant to be a study. There are pinholes in the four corners, implying that after painting it, Degas pinned it to a board or wall in his studio to study rather than sell (it was found in the artist’s studio after his death in 1917). Additionally, he used himself as the model and chose to paint on paper, which was both cost effective and much better suited to a young artist at the start of his career.

One mystery solved

After Degas’s death, the work was passed down to family members and finally inherited by the artist’s great-niece, whose estate sold the portrait in 1994. Ormond suspects this is when a previous conservator adhered the paper support onto canvas and applied a layer of varnish. This would make the work look like a finished oil painting, which would fetch more at auction than an oil study on paper. Getty purchased the portrait in 1995.

In the conservation studio, Ormond put the painting under a microscope. At high magnification, she could see that there was a layer lying underneath the varnish. This layer appeared to be breaking up, giving the surface a hazy, white appearance.

Ormond used a mild solvent to remove a layer of synthetic varnish, as well as an older layer of varnish. Back under the microscope, it became clear what was causing the haziness: the painting was covered with what looked like residues of a glue layer. Glue was either used to affix the paper to the canvas or to attach a protective facing on the painted surface. “Probably that’s what was causing the blanched surface we initially saw when looking at the painting—old glue remnants were visible in between the fine brushstrokes under the varnish layers,” Ormond concludes.

A closer examination

With that mystery solved, Ormond began the detailed work of removing the glue under high magnification, using warm water and the fine tip of a swab stick. This was a time-consuming process but an important one: inevitably, over time, any remaining glue would resurface and need to be removed. Then, she applied a very thin layer of varnish to the painting’s surface. On top of that layer, she retouched the tiny areas where the original paint had been lost. The varnish, a reversible material, acts as a barrier between the original painting and Ormond’s retouching, allowing a future conservator to easily return the painting to the condition as it currently exists.

Ormond also enlisted the help of scientists at the Getty Conservation Institute to identify the elements found in the work, which can suggest what pigments the artist may have used. She wanted help answering a question that was plaguing her: what is that red area along the bottom of the painting?

Senior scientist Karen Trentelman and graduate intern Thomas Boers used a technique called macro X-ray fluorescence (macro-XRF) scanning, in which a beam of X-rays is scanned across the surface of an artwork, generating maps showing the distribution of individual chemical elements present.

The scan showed that the red layer was rich in iron. This suggests Degas used a reddish-brown iron earth pigment to paint the red layer along the bottom of the portrait.

Degas’s intent with that layer remains a mystery, though Ormond has a theory: the self-portrait could have been cut out of a larger sheet of paper that contained other self-portrait oil studies. Degas may have wanted to paint a self-portrait on top of a reddish ground (foundational layer of paint) and inadvertently overlapped that layer on top of the Getty self-portrait while applying it to the paper. Remember, these were studies he probably never thought would be sold.

“Later on in his career he started using these reddish layers underneath his paintings, and it’s something that you sometimes see in old masters’ work,” Ormond notes. “At this time, he was in Italy, so he was looking at old master paintings and being inspired by their palette as well.”

While the macro-XRF scan can’t provide definitive answers about the artist’s intent, such research adds valuable knowledge about the materials Degas used and could connect to later findings.

“You collect data on one object, and maybe you don’t understand it. But you keep it in mind, and then, when you come across something similar, you can start to connect the dots. And those are the great aha moments that often lead to the development of large, collaborative projects to better understand a particular artist or workshop, and how their work was driven by the culture of their time,” Trentelman explains.

A peek into Degas’s process

It’s pretty safe to say that Degas never meant for this self-portrait to be displayed in a museum. But perhaps that’s what makes it so fascinating. The research and conservation work by Ormond, Trentelman, and Boers helps further our understanding of Degas’s intent with this work. Now, the small study serves as a window into his journey as a developing artist, on his way to becoming the creator he’s remembered as today.

“I think the wonderful, the curious, and sometimes even the rather frustrating thing about Degas as an artist is that you never really know when he finished his compositions. He reworked many of his paintings, fiddling with them in his studio for years and years,” Ormond says. “He never seemed to stop experimenting.”