Edgar DEGAS – Signed autograph letter

Autograph letter signed to his friend Henri Rouart. Wednesday ; 2 pages in-12°.
Degas wonders about a painting of which there is a similar one in the Alfred Bruyas collection: “My dear friend, Tell me your opinion. There is a similar painting, a little bigger it seems to me, in Montpellier at the Museum leg - Bruyas - Send me the object by the carrier with your correct diagnosis. How are you ? I've been pretty shaken up lately. Are you receiving us on Friday?…”

Edgar Degas and Henri Rouart began their long and beautiful friendship at the Louis-Legrand College in Paris. Henri Rouart is a polytechnician in love with the arts and a painter in his spare time. An engineer, he conceptualized, among other things, the routing of express mail in Paris via an underground piping network. He devoted himself fully to his passion for painting in his fifties. He participated in the first Impressionist exhibitions, financially supporting his painter friends. Its prestigious collection is preserved today in the largest national museums.

Jacques-Louis Bruyas, known as Alfred Bruyas, was born in Montpellier in 1821. Coming from a bourgeois family, he studied with the Dominicans of Sorèze. Marked by the Jansenist and Protestant straitjacket still very present in Montpellier, he escaped through painting by taking courses at the Beaux-Arts. He began his life as a collector in Italy. This very eclectic collection encompasses both academic painting from 1846, the romantic movement of 1850 and his contemporaries, including Gustave Courbet, for whom he took up his cause. In 1868, he bequeathed his entire collection to the city of Montpellier so, he said, that "art, principle of three orders of physical, moral and intellectual beauty, ensures men, the elevation of their souls" .