Dali House

Long before the thief of age stole his eyesight and left him playing with pastel abstracts and clay, the Parisian Edgar Hilaire Germain Degas (1834-1917), scion of bankers but shy nonetheless, having on the strength of a few kind words from the great Ingres co-founded impressionism, painted his tender and graceful ballerinas. Above is “Dancers in Pink”.

He was, in fact, codebarred “the painter of dancers” for quick accounting purposes, though to be fair it was the play of colour and light in motion that drew him like a moth to the stage lights (not just the pretty girls), and many other scenes beyond the theatre as well, most notably the racecourse (more fleet legs).

But of all the girls in all the dance joints he ever wandered into, Louise, Suzanne and Blanche Mante were his favourites.

Their father, Louis-Amedee Mante, played double bass at the Paris Opera, and les jeunes filles got to know the stage early on, and Papa was also a practitioner of the infant art of photography.

Degas was an opera buff and shutterbug too, so by the time the girls were dance students they were already modelling for him, and he painted “The Mante Family” as well.

They particularly appealed to him because he preferred his models to be similar in appearance. Their sisterhood made them far more famous in their own time than their tutus.

“There is no evidence that Degas had amorous liaisons with any of the dancers (it would have been quite common at the time for members of his class to have mistresses among the corps de balletMezzo-Mondo.com, “however [uh-oh] Daniel Halevy, son of the writer Ludovic Halevy, maintained that ‘he finds them all delightful and excuses them for all they do and laughs at everything they say’.”

Anyway, according to a new book, “The Private Lives of the Impressionists” by Sue Roe, Degas saw women only as the vital ingredients of his paintings, as models but not as companions: “What would I want a wife for? Imagine someone who at the end of a gruelling day in the studio said ‘that’s a nice painting dear’.”

Daddy Mante didn’t hurt his daughters careers a bit by flogging his snapshots of them along with nudge-nudge nudies, and, a showman to the core, he managed to talk a popular journalist pen-named Curnonsky into playing his girls up repeatedly as “The Beautiful Mante Girls”. (Maurice Edmond Sailland later got in trouble for using the pseudonym Curnonsky: He was jailed as a Russian spy, but still ended up writing best-selling cookbooks, a fitting end for a journalist.)

The Mante Girls became opera singers, Louise achieving the greatest fame and appearing on many magazine covers, but they all did well.

Degas, of course, did even better. Ultimately, though, the not-really-an-impressionist-at-all-so-bugger-off preferred to stay indoors. He once even advocated a blast of birdshot for anyone caught doing otherwise.

He was such a celebrity, though, that when he withdrew from the scene in 1886, counting his money and discovering a talent for sculpture but rarely exhibiting, people thought he’d gone mentally ajar. His anti-Semitism, which spilled out during the Dreyfuss fuss, was likely a contributing factor in his being blissfully ignored until his death in 1917.

There’s a nice write-up on the Mante sisters at the coyly erotic Tallulahs.com. Below is Degas’ “Four Dancers”.