Edgar Degas: A Guide to Degas’ Life and Art

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was a French painter, sculptor, and printmaker who belonged to a group of pioneering late-nineteenth-century Parisian Impressionists. Degas’s artistic talents spanned numerous mediums, including oil painting, wax sculpture, pastel drawing, monotype, and lithograph. While Degas focused on history paintings early in his career, he gained fame for his depictions of modern life in France with subjects such as ballet dancers, milliners, laundresses, and jockeys.

Degas was a leading artist in the Impressionist movement, but he rejected that association and instead identified as a Realist. Unlike other Impressionist artists, Degas painted indoors and captured subjects in studied positions instead of fleeting moments en plein air.

• Early beginnings: Edgar Degas was born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar de Gas on July 19, 1834, in Paris, France. His mother, Celestine, was an opera singer and his father, Auguste, was a banker. Degas received a classical education at a distinguished Lycée Louis-le-Grand boys school.
• Artistic journey: Degas exhibited artistic talent as a boy, and at the age of 18, he became a registered copyist at the Louvre, where he reproduced paintings by many Old Masters and studied the art of modern French painters like Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In 1855, Degas trained for a year at the École des Beaux-Arts under the guidance of Louis Lamothe, a disciple of Ingres, but left the art school to travel to Italy. There he continued his studies by copying works by Italian Old Masters including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
• Return to Paris: Degas traveled back to Paris in 1859 to continue producing traditional historical paintings, portraits, and self-portraits. In 1865, he exhibited at the Paris Salon, but when he failed to garner attention, he decided to shift his focus from history and toward modern subject matter. By the late 1860s, Degas regularly socialized in Paris with a troop of other distinguished French impressionists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edouard Manet.
• The Impressionist Exhibition: After a trip to New Orleans to visit family, Degas returned to Paris in 1873 where he and his fellow avant-garde French artists held their own art exhibition independent of the Salon's jurisdiction. Between 1874 and 1886, the group put on eight Impressionist exhibitions, where Degas showcased many portraits of lower-class contemporary women, including laundresses, milliners, and ballerinas. Degas showcased a collection of nude pastel paintings of bathing women at the final exhibition in 1886, stirring up controversy due to the supposedly ungraceful posing of the subjects.
• Legacy and death: Degas died at the age of 83 on September 27, 1917. While art historians still view him as one of the most talented and innovative painters of his generation, he has a somewhat polarizing legacy. Despite his friendship with some female artists, namely Mary Cassatt, he had misogynistic views, and his anti-Semitic beliefs alienated him from friends.

Degas’s oeuvre features the following characteristics.

1. 1. Composition: Degas consistently framed scenes asymmetrically and displayed subjects from atypical vantage points.
2. 2. Ballerinas: Degas chose ballet dancers as one of his most frequently used subjects, particularly lower-class dancers from the Paris Opéra. Some of his most notable works featuring ballerinas include The Dance Foyer at the Opera on the rue Le Peletier (1872), Dancers Practicing at the Barre (1877), The Dance Class (1874), and The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1881).
3. 3. Pastels: In the later years of his life, after he began to lose his eyesight, he relied more heavily on vibrant pastels. With pastels, he abandoned detailed line work in favor of rougher brushstrokes, which led to expressive pieces that became his most Impressionist artworks.
4. 4. Positions: Degas often portrayed ballerinas stretching awkwardly backstage or physically fatigued after a dance session. His suite of nude pastels featured in the 1886 Impressionist exhibition displayed women laboring to bathe themselves in uncomfortable positions. Even in his racecourse paintings, instead of portraying the glamor and thrill of an actual race, he typically showed horses and jockeys nervously milling before races.

Degas's most famous works of art include:

1. 1. The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1881): The only sculpture that Degas ever displayed in public, The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, was first met with mixed reactions—some considered the sculpture ugly, but others praised Degas for its realism and his innovativeness in dressing the statue in an actual skirt, bodice, and slippers. The original wax sculpture is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C, and a bronze cast made from the original is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen is also sometimes known by its French title, La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans.
2. 2. The Dance Class (1874): In this oil painting, Degas depicts a ballet class in a rehearsal room in the old Paris Opéra. Degas fills the room with 24 women—ballet dancers and their mothers—as ballet master Jules Perrot overseeing the class. You can view the original painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and a variant at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
3. 3. A Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873): Degas produced this oil painting of his brother’s father-in-law Michel Musson's cotton firm while he was visiting New Orleans. In this work, Degas shows a mastery of composition and perspective with more than 12 men located in numerous positions throughout the cotton office. A Cotton Office in New Orleans is housed at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau in France.

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