Landscape with Rocks

In November of 1892 Degas exhibited at the gallery of Paul Durand-Ruel approximately twenty-six monotype prints that he had retouched extensively with pastel. The exhibition came as something of a surprise to Degas’s contemporaries because the subject was landscape, a genre for which Degas had previously expressed disdain. Nevertheless, his Pointillist touches of pink, orange, green, and blue pastels heighten their chromatic intensity and create a sense of anthropomorphism in the tooth like rocks in the background.