The Collector of Prints 1866

This is Edgar Degas's portrait of a collector of prints, painted with oil on canvas. The very notion of collecting prints speaks to the rise of industrial society. Only with the invention of mechanical means of reproduction could artworks become so widely available, and affordable enough, to be collected like specimens. The prints themselves, which would have been made through processes like etching and lithography, are conspicuously hand-worked. Note that the collector holds one of the prints up for close inspection. And how does this all reflect on painting? Well, one could say that Degas, by carefully building up the figure in layers of oil paint, has made his own kind of print, of a man steeped in a world of mechanically reproduced images. This painting can remind us that the world of unique, handmade objects is not so separate from that of mass production.