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A new drawing by Degas donated to Orsay
14/12/13 - Acquisition - Paris, Musée d’Orsay - A new drawing by Edgar Degas (ill. 1) has joined the Musée d’Orsay’s reference collection of the artist’s graphic work. A gift from Françoise Heilbrun, the museum’s emblematic curator of the photographic department for decades, it adds a new effigy of the younger brother, René, to the corpus of portraits of the Degas siblings already preserved. Dedicated to "My brother René", the sheet held a special place for René, who kept it until his death, as did his Portrait with Inkwell, an exactly contemporary painting now conserved, along with two preparatory drawings in black pencil and red chalk, by the Smith College Museum in Northampton (Massachusetts).