René de Gas by Degas, Edgar
This is Edgar Degas's portrait of his younger brother, René de Gas, painted in 1855. Degas was twenty-one, and still signing his name 'De Gas.' He had not yet become the painter of dancers and Parisian life. He was a young artist trained in classical draftsmanship, and he used his own family as his first true subject.
What arrests you is the child's face. René is not relaxed and he is not playful. His eyes are steady, his mouth firm, and his dark hair is smoothed into a rigid side part. The starched white collar frames his chin like a formal device, holding him upright. Degas places the boy against a deliberately empty background, so nothing distracts you from what the child is being asked to perform: adult solemnity.
This portrait sits at the very beginning of Degas's long career. His later work would capture the unguarded moments of bodies in motion. Here, there is no movement and no unguarding. What is already present, and would stay with Degas his whole life, is a refusal to flatter. He watches his brother with a realist's patience, painting the way childhood felt from the inside: a serious business, full of people telling you to sit still.
René de Gas hangs in a private collection, but in this image, the boy is still waiting for his brother to say he can get up.
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Transcript
He is a child, but that is not what the painting wants you to see first. Degas was twenty-one when he painted this. He needed a subject. So he sat his younger brother René down in a dark jacket and a stiff white collar. Then he asked him to hold still. And René did. Look at the weight in those dark, unblinking eyes. The boy is not smiling. Children in 1855 were not asked to smile for portraits. Degas surrounded his brother with nothing, only neutral ochre shadow. What remains is a brother holding a pose, and a painter learning how to see the person inside it.