While Edgar Degas is celebrated for his portraits and his dancers, his nudes are frequently overlooked. Degas and the Nude explores the artist’s treatment of the nude figure from his early years in the 1850s and 1860s, through his triumphs in the 1870s and 1880s, all the way to his last decades when this theme—in paintings, pastels, drawings, prints, and sculpture—reigned over his artistic production. Incorporating comparisons with the works of artists from Ingres and Delacroix to Bonnard, Picasso, and Matisse, Degas and the Nude is the most comprehensive survey of the theme to appear in a generation.

George T. M. Shackelford is Chair of the Art of Europe and the Arthur K. Solomon Curator of Modern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Xavier Rey is Curator of Paintings at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and a specialist in nineteenth-century French painting. LUCIAN FREUD is among the most renowned figurative painters of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. MARTIN GAYFORD is a culture critic who has written extensively about art and jazz. He sat for Lucian Freud for a portrait in oils and an etching. ANNE ROQUEBERT is Chief Curator at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

"The catalogue sets a standard....Every conceivable stone is overturned in the cause of elaborating on Degas's vision. There's the recurring use of the nude, of course, but also Degas's relationship with artistic forebears and contemporaries, important painters he inspired, his immediate cultural milieu, and the bravura employment of media, particularly in the pastels and mono-prints....Degas and the Nude is a triumph."

- Mario Naves, The New Criterion, December 2011