Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste de Gas

A young tenor sings to his guitar while an old man behind him bows his head and listens. The listener is the painter's father, and the room is his own music salon in Paris.

The story behind the painting

Auguste de Gas, the painter's father, was a music lover. Every Monday evening family and friends gathered in the music room of his apartment at 4 rue de Mondovi in Paris, sometimes with performances on his Érard grand piano by his daughter Marguerite, Blanche Camus, Suzanne Manet and Marie Dihau. Degas knew the Catalan tenor Lorenzo Pagans, celebrated in Paris, who sang in private salons. English Wikipedia dates this double portrait to about 1871 to 1872, while Wikidata gives only the 1870s.

What to look for

Pagans sits facing us on a simple wooden chair, legs crossed, the guitar on his thighs. Its light wood and mother-of-pearl inlays shine against his dark suit, and a dark green ribbon hangs almost unseen from its head. His mouth is half open in song, his eyes fixed on something beyond the right edge. Behind him Auguste de Gas leans forward, hands clasped before his knees, head lowered. An open music book on the dark piano frames the old man's head. Faces, hands and guitar are precise, the rest loosely brushed.

Meaning and intent

Degas set youth against age, and the performer against his listener. The bodies do not turn toward each other but toward the room, where other guests may sit beyond the frame. The father looks down, lost in thought, his expression all intense listening. The author Melissa MacQuillan wrote that rarely has the relationship between the performer and his listener been so clearly depicted. It is music in a private salon, not a concert hall, the same world Degas explored in his portraits of musicians from the late 1860s.

Legacy

It is one of the few portraits Degas made of his father. Around the same time he painted a variation, Degas' Father Listening to Lorenzo Pagans, now in Boston, where the father takes the light and Pagans sits in shadow. After Auguste died in 1874, Degas returned to the theme in an 1882 double portrait. Manet, who also heard Pagans, painted him in 1879, and his 1860 The Spanish Singer may have been a model for Degas. This canvas, about 55 by 40 cm, is in the Musée d'Orsay.