Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas (Paris, 1834 - Paris, 1917) was a French painter, draftsman, sculptor and printmaker. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, although he rejected the term and preferred to be called a realist. His importance lies in the precision of his drawing, his capture of movement and a range of subjects, including dancers, racehorses, women at their toilette and portraits, treated with off-centre compositions that look almost like snapshots. More than half of his work is devoted to dance, and his portraits are admired for their psychological complexity and for the sense of isolation they convey. His paintings are held in museums and collections around the world, and his way of composing pictures influenced later artists.

Childhood and academic training

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar de Gas was born in Paris on 19 July 1834 into a moderately wealthy family. He was the eldest of five children. His mother, Célestine Musson, was a Creole from New Orleans, and his father, Augustin De Gas, was a banker. Later the painter adopted the simpler spelling of his surname, Degas, by which he became famous. He began his schooling at eleven at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. His mother died when he was thirteen, and for the rest of his youth his father and several unmarried uncles were the main influences on him.

Degas began to paint early. By 1853, when he took his baccalauréat in literature at eighteen, he had turned a room in the family home into an artist's studio. After school he registered as a copyist at the Louvre, but his father expected him to study law. In November 1853 he enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris, though he put little effort into it.

In 1855 he met Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whom he revered. He never forgot the older painter's advice: draw lines, and still more lines, from life and from memory. The same year he was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied drawing with Louis Lamothe and followed the style of Ingres.

Italy and the first major works

In July 1856 he travelled to Italy, where he stayed for the next three years. There he copied works by Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and other Renaissance artists. Unlike conventional copyists, he usually chose a single detail that had caught his eye, often a secondary figure or a head, and treated it almost as a portrait. This habit of looking foreshadows much of his later painting.

In 1858, while staying with his aunt's family in Naples, he made the first studies for The Bellelli Family, one of his early ambitious works. Back in Paris in 1859 he took a studio large enough to work on the canvas, which he meant to exhibit at the Salon. It remained unfinished until 1867. In these years he also began several history paintings, including Alexander and Bucephalus and The Daughter of Jephthah (1859-1860), Semiramis Building Babylon (1860) and Young Spartans (around 1860).

In 1861 he made his first studies of horses while visiting his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon in Normandy. He first exhibited at the Salon in 1865, when the jury accepted Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which drew little attention. Over the next five years he exhibited at the Salon every year, but none of those works was a history painting. His Steeplechase, the Fallen Jockey (Salon of 1866) marked his break with the traditional history painting and his growing interest in contemporary life.

A change of direction with Manet

The main influence behind this shift was Édouard Manet, whom Degas met in 1864. According to an anecdote that may be apocryphal, the two were copying the same Velázquez portrait in the Louvre when they first met. In the years that followed, both artists looked closely at the city and its everyday scenes.

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Degas joined the National Guard to defend Paris, and this kept him away from painting for a time. During rifle practice his eyesight was found to be defective, and for the rest of his life his eye problems were a constant worry. He later blamed them for the unfinished passages in many of his works, an explanation that some colleagues and collectors met with scepticism.

After the war, in 1872, Degas spent an extended period in New Orleans, where his brother René and other relatives lived. He stayed at the home of his Creole uncle on Esplanade Avenue and painted several works there, many of them family portraits. One of them, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, was the only work he sold to a museum during his lifetime, the museum in Pau.

Family crisis and the Impressionist group

Degas returned to Paris in 1873. His father died the following year, and Degas discovered that his brother René had accumulated enormous business debts. To protect the family's reputation he sold his house and an art collection he had inherited to pay them off. From then on he depended on sales of his own paintings for income for the first time in his life. Many of his best-known works date from this decade.

Disappointed with the official Salon, he joined a group of young artists who were organising independent shows, since the jury almost always rejected their work. The group came to be known as the Impressionists. Between 1874 and 1886 it staged eight exhibitions, and Degas took a leading part in organising them, although he had constant disputes with other members. He showed in all but one.

His differences with the landscape painters, especially Claude Monet, ran deep. Degas mocked painting outdoors and felt uneasy with the scandal and publicity his colleagues sought. He also disliked the word Impressionist, which the press had made popular, and he insisted that non-Impressionist artists such as Jean-Louis Forain and Jean-François Raffaëlli be included in the shows. These tensions contributed to the group's disbanding in 1886.

As his finances improved, Degas built a collection of works by artists he admired, among them El Greco, Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Three names dominated the collection: Ingres, Delacroix and Daumier. The final inventory recorded twenty paintings and eighty-eight drawings by Ingres, and thirteen paintings and some two hundred drawings by Daumier, but no Monet.

Dancers, horses and new techniques

Changes in subject matter went hand in hand with changes in technique. His dark palette, which owed something to Dutch painting, gave way to brighter colours and bolder brushstrokes. His first major work featuring dancers was Mlle. Fiocre in the Ballet La Source, shown at the Salon of 1868, and from 1870 such subjects multiplied. Degas showed dancers rehearsing or backstage, as professionals doing a job rather than as decorative figures. These paintings sold well, which encouraged him to paint them more often after his family's ruin.

He also painted café life, as in L'Absinthe and Singer with a Glove, and women at work as milliners and laundresses. His pictures often hint at a story without telling it. Interior, also known as The Rape, has puzzled historians who have looked in vain for a literary source, although the scene may simply show a case of prostitution. His dancers have athletic, supple bodies, while his laundresses are heavy and solid, and the difference reflects the work each woman does.

By the late 1870s he had mastered both oil and pastel. The dry medium let him work out forms with ease and use colour freely, and he applied it in complex layers and textures. In the mid-1870s he returned to printmaking, which he had neglected for ten years. He learned from his old friend Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic, an innovator in the technique, and experimented with lithography and monotype. He made around three hundred monotypes in two periods, and often reworked the prints with pastel.

Photography was another stimulus. In the late 1880s he developed a real passion for it. He photographed friends, often by lamplight, and took pictures of dancers and nudes that served as references for his paintings and drawings.

Portraits, nudes and the last years of painting

Portraits, both individual and group, are a central part of his output. Interested in how a person reveals social standing through physiognomy, posture, dress and other attributes, he painted The Bellelli Family, portraits at the Stock Exchange and scenes from the courtroom. In Portraits at the Stock Exchange (1879) he showed a group of Jewish businessmen with features that modern experts regard as anti-Semitic. In 1881 he exhibited two pastels, Criminal Physiognomies, about young men convicted of murder in the so-called Abadie Affair, whose trial he attended with a sketchbook in hand.

From the late 1880s and through the following decade, his pictures of women bathing, combing their hair or drying themselves became looser. The strokes that model the forms are more free, the backgrounds simpler and the meticulous naturalism of his youth gave way to greater abstraction. Even so, these works make strong use of the colour techniques of Impressionism.

His method was deliberate. He worked indoors, usually in his studio, from memory, photographs or live models. His few landscapes came from imagination or memory. He repeated subjects with variations in composition or treatment, and he said that nothing in art should look like chance. Andrew Forge described his works as prepared, calculated and developed in stages, with endless reflection on how each part fits the whole.

Sculpture and reputation

Degas did not limit himself to painting and drawing. By around 1880 sculpture had become one more field of experiment, though during his lifetime he showed only one piece in public, Little Dancer of Fourteen Years (1881). It was a nearly life-size wax figure with real hair and a cloth tutu. It caused a strong reaction: most critics admired its realism but condemned the ugliness of the girl. J.-K. Huysmans wrote that the statuette had overturned the traditions of sculpture, just as Degas had shaken the conventions of painting.

Its originality lay in turning away from the smooth surfaces of classical sculpture and adding real hair and clothing. These additions heightened the illusion but also raised questions about what counts as real in art. After his death, his heirs found around 150 wax sculptures in his studio. The founder Adrien Hébrard concluded that 74 could be cast in bronze. The Hébrard Foundry produced these bronzes from 1919 to 1936.

Degas's reputation fluctuated during his life. His paintings accepted at the Salon between 1865 and 1870 earned praise from critics such as Jules-Antoine Castagnary. Later, when he joined the Impressionists, the Salon rejected his change of direction, while critics valued his drawings and pastels above all for their graphic quality. The 1886 show of pastel nudes provoked a considerable body of criticism, mostly positive.

Today he is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, although his theories and some of his techniques clashed with those of the group. His sense of colour, of moving forms and of dynamic composition inspired other members. Degas had no formal pupils, but he influenced Jean-Louis Forain, Mary Cassatt and Walter Sickert, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec admired him greatly.

Private life, politics and death

Degas held that art should be kept apart from personal life. He never married and lived discreetly. He was known for his wit, which could be cruel. The novelist George Moore called him an old curmudgeon, and Degas himself cultivated the image of a misanthropic bachelor. Politically conservative, he opposed social reform and showed little interest in technological novelties such as the telephone.

His anti-Semitism grew stronger during the Dreyfus Affair, which divided France from the 1890s into the early 1900s. By the mid-1890s he had broken off relations with all his Jewish friends and refused to hire models he thought might be Jewish. He remained a member of the anti-Dreyfusard, anti-Semitic circles until his death.

His eyesight worsened after 1890, and in his last years he was almost blind. He worked in pastel until the end of 1907 and is believed to have continued making sculptures until 1910. In 1912 he effectively stopped working, when the planned demolition of his house on the rue Victor Massé forced him to move. He died alone in Paris in September 1917, wandering the city's streets.

Legacy

Degas's works are held in museums and private collections around the world, and he is one of the most sought-after artists in the international art market. Recent major retrospectives, including those devoted to his drawings and sketchbooks, to his treatment of the nude and to his friendship with Mary Cassatt, have reassessed his career. The asteroid 6673 Degas is named in his honour.