Edgar Degas

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas was born in Paris on July 19, 1834, the eldest of five children in a prosperous family with banking interests. His father, Auguste De Gas, managed the Paris branch of a bank founded by the artist's grandfather in Naples, and his mother, Célestine Musson, came from a French Creole family with roots in New Orleans ^[1]. The young Edgar later simplified the aristocratic-looking spelling of the family name to Degas.

He was educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, one of the most demanding schools in France, where he received a solid grounding in the classics and began drawing seriously. After finishing school in 1853 he registered to study law, a concession to his father's expectations, but he abandoned the coursework quickly ^[1]. Auguste De Gas, who loved music and painting himself, accepted his son's decision with relatively little resistance.

Degas entered the studio of Louis Lamothe, a former pupil of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and enrolled briefly at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1855 ^[2]. The encounter with the Ingres tradition marked him for life. Decades later he still repeated the older master's advice to draw lines, many lines, from memory and from nature. Between 1856 and 1859 he lived mainly in Italy, staying with relatives in Naples and Florence and filling notebooks with copies after Renaissance painters in Rome and elsewhere ^[2]. Those years of copying gave him a command of the figure that few of his later colleagues could match.

Back in Paris, Degas first aimed at the conventional route to reputation: large history paintings submitted to the official Salon. Works from this period include ambitious classical subjects and the penetrating group portrait known as The Bellelli Family, painted from studies made of his aunt's household in Florence ^[3]. The Salon accepted several of his pictures during the 1860s, but they attracted little attention.

A chance meeting changed his direction. Around 1862, while copying in the Louvre, he met Édouard Manet, who drew him into the circle of writers and painters who gathered at the Café Guerbois ^[1]. Under their influence, and with the encouragement of the critic Edmond Duranty, Degas gradually dropped historical subjects in favor of contemporary life: the racetrack at Longchamp, the orchestra pit of the Opéra, portraits of friends caught in unposed moments.

In 1872 he traveled to New Orleans to visit his mother's relatives, who worked in the cotton trade. The trip produced A Cotton Office in New Orleans, a scene of clerks and brokers examining raw cotton, which in 1878 became the first painting by Degas purchased by a public museum when the municipal museum in Pau acquired it ^[3]. By then he had committed himself to the group of independent artists soon nicknamed the Impressionists. He helped organize their first exhibition in 1874 and showed work in seven of the eight group shows held through 1886, missing only the 1882 edition ^[2]. He argued constantly with his colleagues about who should be admitted, disliked painting outdoors, and rejected the Impressionist name, insisting he was a realist. Yet no one did more to keep the exhibitions going.

Anyone asking who was Edgar Degas usually knows the answer through the dancers. From the early 1870s onward he haunted the classrooms and wings of the Paris Opéra, and roughly half of his mature output depicts ballet subjects ^[4]. He was less interested in performance than in labor: girls stretching at the barre, adjusting shoulder straps, slumped on benches, watched by mothers and ballet masters. Paintings such as The Dance Class (versions in the Musée d'Orsay and the Metropolitan Museum of Art) turned rehearsal rooms into studies of bodies under discipline ^[4].

His compositional inventions rank among the chief Edgar Degas achievements. Influenced by Japanese prints and by the framing accidents of photography, he cropped figures at the edge of the canvas, tilted floors upward, and viewed scenes from boxes above the stage or from behind pillars ^[2]. He applied the same eye to café concerts, milliners' shops, women ironing, and the bleak café interior known as In a Café or L'Absinthe (1875 to 1876), which scandalized some viewers for its unsentimental picture of urban drift ^[3].

Degas was also a restless technician. He revived and reinvented pastel, building color in layered strokes until it rivaled oil in density, and he produced monotypes, etchings, and lithographs in quantity ^[4]. In 1881 he exhibited Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, a two-thirds life-size wax figure of the ballet student Marie van Goethem dressed in a real bodice, tutu, and hair ribbon. Critics were divided, with some calling it brutally ugly and others recognizing a landmark; it proved to be the only sculpture he ever showed publicly ^[5]. In his final decades the great series of women bathing, drying themselves, and combing their hair carried his draftsmanship into ever bolder color and simplification.

Degas never married and left no evidence of any lasting romantic attachment. He lived alone in Montmartre apartments crowded with his own work and with a private collection that grew to include paintings by Ingres, Delacroix, El Greco, Gauguin, and Cézanne ^[3]. Friends described a sharp wit, fierce opinions, and a fundamentally private character. He was close for many years to the writer Ludovic Halévy and his family, and he maintained a long professional friendship with the American painter Mary Cassatt, whom he invited to exhibit with the Impressionists in 1879 ^[2].

Money shaped his middle years more than is often realized. When Auguste De Gas died in 1874, the family bank was found to be burdened with debts, and Degas quietly assumed obligations on behalf of his brothers. For the first time he needed to sell pictures to live, a pressure that helps explain his steady production of marketable pastels of dancers during the late 1870s and 1880s ^[1].

His politics darkened his last decades. During the Dreyfus affair, the national crisis over a Jewish army officer falsely convicted of treason, Degas took the anti-Dreyfusard side and voiced antisemitic views that ended several long friendships, including his intimacy with the Halévy household ^[3]. Biographers continue to weigh this prejudice against the humane attention his art paid to working women and ordinary labor.

Trouble with his eyes shadowed Degas from his thirties onward; he traced the damage to his time serving in the artillery during the siege of Paris in 1870 and 1871 ^[1]. As his sight weakened he relied increasingly on pastel, on broader handling, and on sculpture, modeling horses, dancers, and bathers in wax and clay that he could shape partly by touch. He kept these figures in his studio, reworking them for years and casting almost nothing in his lifetime ^[5].

After about 1912, when he was forced to leave a longtime apartment on the rue Victor Massé, he essentially stopped working. Contemporaries recalled him in his final years as a nearly blind old man walking the boulevards of a wartime Paris he could barely see ^[3]. He died in the city on September 27, 1917, at the age of eighty-three, and was buried in the family vault in Montmartre Cemetery ^[1].

His studio told a story he had kept hidden. Executors found around 150 wax sculptures in varying states of repair, and his heirs arranged for some seventy of them, including Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, to be cast in bronze by the Hébrard foundry beginning in 1919 ^[5]. The posthumous studio sales of 1918 and 1919 also released thousands of drawings, prints, and paintings, along with his remarkable personal collection, into museums and private hands.

Degas occupies an unusual position in the history of modern art: a founder of the Impressionist exhibitions who shared almost none of the movement's habits. He worked in the studio from memory and notes, prized line over spontaneous color, and famously insisted that his art was the product of study rather than impulse ^[2]. That combination of classical training and modern subject matter made him a bridge between Ingres and the twentieth century, and painters as different as Toulouse-Lautrec, Walter Sickert, and Picasso learned from his croppings and viewpoints ^[4].

His works now anchor collections at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and bronzes of the Little Dancer appear in museums on several continents ^[4]. Scholarship since the 1980s has broadened the picture, examining the social world of the young dancers he portrayed, his experiments with photography, and the contradictions of his politics.

Among the more telling Edgar Degas facts is that he sold reluctantly, exhibited rarely after 1886, and hoarded his best work, so the full range of his achievement only became visible after his death. More than a century later, the rehearsal rooms, racecourses, and lamplit interiors he recorded remain some of the most closely studied images of nineteenth century Paris ^[3].