THE WORDS are by Valery, about Degas. I had not intended to write about this pastel (Fig.1). After all, it's quite a straightforward depiction of the old Degas, I think on his deathbed, made from a snapshot in a book I found on the Quai Voltaire called Mon Oncle Degas. But when Richard Shone asked me to write something about the picture for THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, I looked at it again, (I own it), and it set me to daydreaming. What is there for me to love about this old antisemite? His drawing. His antisemitism is well documented. Like most of that ilk, there were some 'good' Jews in his life (you should read a speech Himmler gave to his S.S. on the subject of 'good' Jews every decent German knows). We all knew of his great friendship with the Halkvys and how I'Affaire Dreyfus ended those lunches and suppers in the Rue de Douai forever (after 50 years!); he got Zoe to read Drumont's vile La Libre Parole to him at breakfast; he broke with Camondo, Pissarro and other Jews and was well-known for anti-Jewish epithets. 

This has not been a grumpy digression. This is part of my own Degas, the sad old creature in bed. It would amount to a hill of beans were it not for the old man mad about drawing. He drives me mad. 

K. Clark called him the best draughtsman since the high renaissance. May not be quite true because Rem-brandt, Goya and Ingres come in between . . . but no-one drew the figure better, I think. Three great groups occur to me: the earlier Degas of the perfecting line with its debt to Ingres; the Degas ('Je suis coloriste avec la ligne') of the unique, pastel naked girls, a glory of Impressionism all his own; and then the cynical Degas in reclusive old age, in our century - drawing dancing women without regard to 'beauty' or 'distortion', using distortions full of drawing pride (and misogyny!) never seen before or since . .. . These last drawings (invented, created better than distorted) are his equivalent to the agonised Mt Ste Victoire paintings being gouged out in the south at the same moment by Cezanne. Both start from almost nowhere except two in-credible, reclusive, isolated sensibilities and arrive at sculp-tured mountains of flat, massed art. Degas loved to repeat what a critic said of him in a review: 'Continually uncertain about proportions'. Nothing, Degas claimed, could better describe his state of mind, his drawing struggle. This old, bitter antisemite in bed not only put lines in places which seem more 'right' than anyone else's lines, but like Michelangelo in his last crucifixion drawings, he uttered a spiritual cry, maybe of anguish at the human shell in imperfected life. 

Degas drew so well because he wouldn't give up. Valkry wrote about the drawings: 'Nothing could be more opposed to reverie'. At seventy, Degas told Rouart: 'You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day'. He would say: 'not enough emphasis' ... He could never go far enough. It took the solitary misanthrope into blindness before he gave up the drawing he said he was born for.