Many of Degas’s pastel drawings were made over a monotype base, a practice he seems to have begun around 1876 or 1877. A monotype is made by applying either black ink, oil paint, or oil diluted with turpentine to a non-absorbent surface such as copper or glass. The image is transferred onto a sheet of paper by laying it onto the plate and applying pressure, either by rubbing or by passing through a press. While usually only one impression of each print could be made, occasionally a second, fainter impression could be pulled before the ink was used up. It would be this second pull that Degas extensively reworked in pastel, although he would occasionally retouch the first pull as well. Interestingly, the artist himself seems to have avoided the term ‘monotype’, preferring instead to define these works as ‘drawings made with greasy ink and put through a press’.

The present sheet is one of a group of some three dozen pastel-worked monotype landscapes executed by Degas between 1890 and 1892. Unlike his earlier monotypes, made using black printer’s ink, in the monotype landscapes of the early 1890s Degas used coloured pigments, in the form of oil paint, adding a second layer of colour with the subsequent application of pastel. Degas is said to have referred to these pastellized monotypes as ‘imaginary landscapes’.

In July 1856 Degas left Paris for Naples, where his grandfather René-Hilaire Degas had settled and established a successful career. He later returned in 1886 and in 1906. As Jane Munro notes of the present sheet in particular, ‘in 1892 Degas produced from memory a monotype of the city’s most distinctive landmark, Mount Vesuvius, a topographical feature that had been a magnet for European landscape painters since at least the seventeenth century.’

Some twenty-five of Degas’s landscapes executed in pastel over monotype, including the present sheet, were exhibited at the Paris gallery of his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in November 1892. This was to be, in fact, the only true one-man exhibition held in Paris in Degas’ lifetime. As a modern scholar has noted of the pastel over monotype drawings shown in the exhibition, ‘These landscapes are far from literal, the configurations of the terrain often fantastic, with monotype in color providing a mysterious background against which the pastels seem to glow. The romanticism of these works suggests more of an affinity with the works of Turner than any other artist.’