"Acquired by the Getty Museum in 1995, Edgar Degas's Album of Pencil Sketches contains forty-odd pages of drawings made by the great French artist while attending the Thursday-night soirees held at the home of his close friend Ludovic Halevy. The drawings range from the simplest of sketches - doodles, really - to more finished drawings, many of them of familiar Degas subjects: laundresses, cafe singers, scenes at the ballet. This book reproduces all of the significant pages from the album.".

"An introductory essay by Carol Armstrong recreates the sophisticated Parisian milieu in which Degas made these sketches. Armstrong argues that the very simplicity of the drawings reflects Degas's conscious "de-skilling" and anticipates twentieth-century developments in the visual arts." "With a postscript in which the artist David Hockney reflects on Degas's achievement in the pages of this sketchbook."--BOOK JACKET.