Winding River

Edgar Degas

1890

Oil monotype and pastel on heavy paper, laid down on paper-wrapped millboard

Minneapolis Institute of Art

An abstract landscape depicts a winding river or path through a textured terrain under a hazy, warm-toned sky. Winding River is simultaneously a landscape and an abstraction. Colorful and poetic, it recalls Impressionism but was certainly not painted directly from nature. Rather, Edgar Degas relied on imagination and perhaps also memory, loosely basing this monotype on a Japanese color print made in 1856 by Utagawa Hiroshige, whose work Degas collected. As with many of the nearly fifty landscape monotypes he produced from 1890 onward, Degas began this work by painting in dilute oils on a smooth copper plate, then used a printing press to transfer the image to paper. Continuing to experiment, he turned to drawing and augmented the picture wit