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 larger it seems to me, in Montpellier at the Leg Museum – Bruyas – Send the object back to me by the carrier with your correct diagnosis. How are you ? I've been really busy lately. Are you seeing 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 who loves the arts and is a painter in his spare time. An engineer, he conceptualized, among other things, the delivery of rapid mail to Paris via an underground pipe network. He fully indulged his passion for painting in his fifties. He participated in the first impressionist exhibitions and financially supported his painter friends. His 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 shackles 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 academic painting from 1846, the romantic movement from 1850 and his contemporaries, including Gustave Courbet, for whom he took up the cause. In 1868, he bequeathed his entire collection to the city of Montpellier so, he said, that “art, the principle of three orders of physical, moral and intellectual beauty, ensures for men the elevation of their souls” .