Much is known about the Italian family of Edgar Degas (1834-1917), above all thanks to Riccardo Raimondi’s book Degas e la sua famiglia in Napoli (Naples, 1958) and to the studies of Jean Sutherland Boggs. Yet, going back to the original records, some details need correcting, and there is a little-known fact that concerns Livorno directly: the painter’s paternal grandmother was born here.

The grandfather: not a nobleman, but a baker’s son

The founder of the Neapolitan branch was René Hilaire Degas, the painter’s grandfather. According to family tradition, repeated by Raimondi, the De Gas descended from an old noble family of Languedoc, the De Gast of Bagnols, who later moved to Orléans. The parish registers tell a different story.

René Hilaire was baptised on 14 January 1770 in the parish of Saint-Marceau in Orléans, and not in Meung-sur-Loire as is often stated. He was the son of Pierre Degas, a boulanger (baker), born in Meung-sur-Loire around 1730 and died in Orléans in 1807, and of Anne Hue (1733-1786), who had married in Orléans on 26 July 1756 and had at least ten children. Pierre’s father, Simon, was a charcutier, a pork butcher. A family of craftsmen, then, not of gentlemen.

A curiosity: Guillaume Gauguin, a grocer and the grandfather of another great painter, Paul Gauguin, was born in the same parish of Saint-Marceau in 1784.

In August 1793, in the midst of the Revolution, René Hilaire settled in Naples. There he made his fortune as an exchange broker and then a banker: in 1836 he founded the firm “Degas Padre e Figli” with his sons, linked to the Paris house run by his other sons, and he settled the family in the Palazzo Pignatelli di Monteleone, in Calata Trinità Maggiore, which Neapolitans called “Palazzo d’o Gasse”. He died at Miano, near Naples, on 31 August 1858.

The grandmother from Livorno: Aurora Freppa

Around September 1804, in Naples, René Hilaire married Giovanna Teresa Aurora Freppa. Aurora was born in Livorno on 27 December 1782 and baptised two days later in the Collegiata, today’s Cathedral (Raimondi gives 1783 instead).

Her father, Lorenzo Freppa (c. 1759-1837), a lawyer and merchant born in Naples, owned a firm with branches in Naples and Livorno, for which René Hilaire himself worked before marrying his daughter. Her mother was Maria Rosa Aurisicchio, who died in Naples in 1801. The Freppa family originally came from Piedmont: Aurora’s grandfather, Giovanni Freppa, was born in Cuorgnè, near Turin, around 1730, and died a merchant in Naples in 1814. A family moving between Piedmont, Tuscany and the Kingdom of Naples, like many merchant families of the time.

Aurora died in Naples on 13 April 1841. A portrait of her attributed to Joseph Franque, a pupil of David, is now in Naples. Seven of her children reached adulthood:

• Rosa (1805-1879), married to Giuseppe Morbilli;
• Auguste (Laurent Pierre Augustin Hyacinthe, 1807-1874), who married Célestine Musson, of a New Orleans family, in Paris: they were Edgar’s parents;
• Henri (Edoardo Enrico Carlo, 1809-1879), Edouard (Giovanni Odoardo, 1811-1870) and Achille (Carlo, 1812-1875);
• Laura (1814-1897), married to Baron Gennaro Bellelli;
• Stefanina (Emilia Adelaide Stefanina, 1819-1901).

In the Degas household in Naples, Neapolitan and Italian were spoken, and all of René Hilaire’s children wished to die and be buried in Naples. Edgar himself liked to speak Neapolitan with his Italian friends.

An awkward relative: the antique dealer Giovanni Freppa

Aurora’s brother, Giovanni Andrea Vincenzo Freppa, was also born in Livorno, on 7 December 1795, and baptised on the 10th in the Collegiata. He married Giovanna Cottrau in Naples in 1820 and later settled in Florence, where he became a well-known, and partly notorious, antique dealer. It was he who encouraged the Ginori porcelain factory at Doccia to reproduce Renaissance lustreware, some of which ended up being sold as genuine, and it was he who commissioned from the young sculptor Giovanni Bastianini the “Renaissance” busts that fooled museums: the most famous is the bust of Benivieni, bought at great cost by the Louvre but made by Bastianini in 1864. Giovanni Freppa died in Florence on 11 July 1870.

In 1858-1859 Edgar lived in Florence as the guest of his aunt Laura and her husband Gennaro Bellelli, a political exile: this is when he prepared the great portrait The Bellelli Family. In the same years his great-uncle Giovanni Freppa had his shop in the city. It is plausible that the two met, but so far we have found no documents proving it.

A distant connection

Finally, a personal note. On 4 July 1861 Alfredo Morbilli (1834-1907), son of Rosa Degas and therefore Edgar’s first cousin, married Emilie Delamorte. Emilie was the great-niece of Eugénie Delamorte (1801-1879), a direct ancestor of the author on his mother’s side, through the Kotzian family. A connection by marriage rather than by blood, but one that shows once again how closely intertwined nineteenth-century family networks were.

In conclusion

The painter of dancers, a Parisian by birth, thus had roots in a bakery in Orléans, in a house of Piedmontese merchants and in a grandmother born in Livorno. It is a good example of how “official” genealogies, even those of the most studied figures, always deserve to be checked against primary sources.

Main sources: parish registers of Saint-Marceau (Archives d’Orléans Métropole); baptism registers of the Collegiata of Livorno (Diocesan Archive of Livorno); civil registration of Naples (State Archives of Naples, Antenati portal); R. Raimondi, Degas e la sua famiglia in Napoli, Naples 1958; J. S. Boggs, “Edgar Degas and the Bellellis”, The Art Bulletin, 1955, and “Edgar Degas and Naples”, The Burlington Magazine, 1963.