Lettre autographe signée d'Edgar Degas adressée à Charles Deschamps

Autograph letter dated and signed by Edgar Degas, addressed to the dealer Charles Deschamps, director of Durand-Ruel’s London branch. Three pages in ink on a bifolium.
Minor marginal tears not affecting the text, folds from mailing.
Recently returned from New Orleans, Degas writes to his London dealer to announce the imminent arrival of a delicate composition of dancers, Le Foyer de la danse à l’Opéra de la rue Le Peletier, now held at the Musée d’Orsay: "In the meantime you will receive the little picture you saw in progress and which you had the idea of selling to Mr. Huth - May you succeed! [...] As for the price, it seems to me that £150 to £200 is fair" Deschamps fulfilled the painter’s wishes and sold the painting to Louis Huth, financier and patron of Whistler, for £140. The canvas would later enter the distinguished collection of Isaac de Camondo.
Degas turned towards London at a time when the English art market offered relief from the collapse that followed the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He placed great hopes in this expanding British market, fuelled by lucrative blockbuster exhibitions drawing millions of visitors; Degas’s canvases were shown in eight exhibitions of the Société des Artistes Français. Although he often mentions financial difficulties in his correspondence "At the end of the month I have quite a lot to pay. If some money came in, I would be delighted [...] - Take care of me, my dear Deschamps, I would be most obliged - Tell me also if the season is not too far advanced. I fear it is" his career across the Channel was flourishing and his sales profitable. The painter does not fail to salute the "French colony" of expatriate artists, Giuseppe de Nittis and his close friend James Tissot, whose financial success provided Degas with an example of how effectively a French painter’s work could be marketed in England. Unlike Tissot, however, Degas refused to adapt to market taste, focusing instead on defending the Impressionist cause in France and abroad.
He also devotes a passage to a voracious collector of his works, the baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, patron of his celebrated series of canvases on the Paris Opéra and owner of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe: "I ought to have been in London some time ago, according to what I said. I am not there because the picture for [Jean-Baptiste] Faure is not finished, and I would not like to meet him there without being able to give him better news, and I hardly have time to dawdle if I want not to arrive on the 1^st of September with nothing to deliver to him". Ironically, Faure would later reproach Degas for leaving his canvases unfinished (!) and even sue him a few years afterwards.
 
A rare and exceptional letter tracing the history of one of Degas’s celebrated works and his dealings with dealers and collectors, on the eve of the first Impressionist exhibition to be held the following year.

"My dear Deschamps,
I ought to have been in London some time ago, according to what I said. I am not there because the picture for [Jean-Baptiste] Faure is not finished, and I would not like to meet him there without being able to give him better news, and I hardly have time to dawdle if I want not to arrive on the 1^st of September with nothing to deliver to him - He is leaving London on the 18th or 19th, I know that - Perhaps at the end of the month, a little earlier however, I will come to see you as well as the French colony. But nothing is less certain.
In the meantime you will receive the little picture you saw in progress and which you had the idea of selling to Mr. Huth - May you succeed!
At the end of the month I have quite a lot to pay. If some money came in, I would be delighted -
As for the price, it seems to me that £150 to £200 is fair -
I would like to add two other pieces, a little vaporous - I am working on them now. But it is very hot and I cannot give them all the time they require. -Take care of me, my dear Deschamps, I would be most obliged -
Tell me also if the season is not too far advanced. I fear it is - My regards first to your kind wife, then to Tissot and Nittis.
Yours sincerely,
Degas"