Edgar Degas (, ;; born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, ; 19 July 183427 September 1917) was a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings.
Degas also produced wax sculptures, prints, and drawings. Degas is especially identified with the subject of dance; more than half of his works depict dancers.Trachtman, Paul, Degas and His Dancers, Smithsonian Magazine, April 2003 Although Degas is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, he rejected the term, preferring to be called a realist,Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 31 and did not paint outdoors as many Impressionists did.
Degas was a superb draftsman, and particularly masterly in depicting movement, as can be seen in his rendition of dancers and bathing female nudes. In addition to ballet dancers and bathing women, Degas painted racehorses and racing jockeys, as well as portraits. His portraits are notable for their psychological complexity and their portrayal of human isolation.Brown 1994, p. 11
At the beginning of his career, Degas wanted to be a history painter, a calling for which he was well prepared by his rigorous academic training and close study of classical Western art. In his early thirties he changed course, and by bringing the traditional methods of a history painter to bear on contemporary subject matter, he became a classical painter of modern life.Turner 2000, p. 139
Early life
Degas was born in Paris, France, into a moderately wealthy family. He was the oldest of five children of Célestine Musson De Gas, a Creole from New Orleans, Louisiana, and Augustin De Gas, a banker.Baumann, et al. 1994, p. 86. His maternal grandfather Germain Musson was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, of French descent, and had settled in New Orleans in 1810.
Degas (he adopted this less grandiose spelling of his family name when he became an adult)The family's ancestral name was Degas. Jean Sutherland Boggs explains that De Gas was the spelling, "with some pretensions, used by the artist's father when he moved to Paris to establish a French branch of his father's Neapolitan bank." While Edgar Degas's brother René adopted the still more aristocratic de Gas, the artist reverted to the original spelling, Degas, by the age of thirty. Baumann, et al. 1994, p. 98. began his schooling at age eleven, enrolling in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.Baumann, et al. 1994, p. 86 His mother died when he was thirteen, and the main influences on him for the remainder of his youth were his father and several unmarried uncles.Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 16 Degas began to paint early in life. By the time he graduated from the Lycée with a baccalauréat in literature in 1853, at age 18, he had turned a room in his home into an artist's studio. Upon graduating, he registered as a copyist in the Louvre Museum, but his father expected him to go to law school. Degas duly enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris in November 1853 but applied little effort to his studies.
In 1855, he met Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whom he revered and whose advice he never forgot: "Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist."Werner 1969, p. 14 In April of that year Degas was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts. He studied drawing there with Louis Lamothe, under whose guidance he flourished, following the style of Ingres.Canaday 1969, p. 930–931
In July 1856, Degas traveled to Italy, where he would remain for the next three years. In 1858, while staying with his aunt's family in Naples, he made the first studies for his early masterpiece The Bellelli Family. He also drew and painted numerous copies of works by Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and other Renaissance artists, but—contrary to conventional practice—he usually selected from an altarpiece a detail that had caught his attention: a secondary figure, or a head that he treated as a portrait.Dunlop 1979, p. 19
Artistic career Upon his return to France in 1859, Degas moved into a Paris studio large enough to permit him to begin painting The Bellelli Family—an imposing canvas he intended for exhibition in the Salon, although it remained unfinished until 1867. He also began work on several history paintings: Alexander and Bucephalus and The Daughter of Jephthah in 1859–1860; Sémiramis Building Babylon in 1860; and Young Spartans Exercising around 1860.Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 43 In 1861, Degas visited his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon in Ménil-Hubert-en-Exmes, and made the earliest of his many studies of horses. He exhibited at the Salon for the first time at the Salon of 1865, when the jury accepted his painting Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which attracted little attention.Thomson 1988, p. 48
Although he exhibited annually in the Salon during the next five years, he submitted no more history paintings, and his Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey (Salon of 1866) signaled his growing commitment to contemporary subject matter. The change in his art was influenced primarily by the example of Édouard Manet, whom Degas had met in 1864 (while both were copying the same Diego Velázquez portrait in the Louvre, according to a story that may be apocryphal).Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 23
Upon the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Degas enlisted in the National Guard, where his partaking in the defense of Paris left him little time for painting. During rifle training his eyesight was found to be defective, and for the rest of his life his eye problems were a constant worry to him.Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p. 29
After the war, Degas began in 1872 an extended stay in New Orleans, where his brother René and a number of other relatives lived. Staying at the home of his Creole uncle, Michel Musson, on Esplanade Avenue, Degas produced a number of works, many depicting family members. One of Degas's New Orleans works, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, garnered favorable attention back in France, and was his only work purchased by a museum (the Pau) during his lifetime.Baumann, et al. 1994, p. 202
Degas returned to Paris in 1873, and his father died the following year, whereupon Degas learned that his brother René had amassed enormous business debts. To preserve his family's reputation, Degas sold his house and an art collection he had inherited and used the money to pay off his brother's debts. Dependent for the first time in his life on sales of his artwork for income, he produced much of his greatest work during the decade beginning in 1874.Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p. 33 Disenchanted by now with the Salon, he joined a group of young artists who were organizing an independent exhibiting society. The group soon became known as the Impressionists.
Between 1874 and 1886, they mounted eight art shows, known as the Impressionist Exhibitions. Degas took a leading role in organizing the exhibitions, and he showed his work in all but one of them, despite his persistent conflicts with others in the group. He had little in common with Monet and the other landscape painters in the group, whom he mocked for painting outdoors. Conservative in his social attitudes, he abhorred the scandal created by the exhibitions, as well as the publicity and advertising that his colleagues sought. He also deeply disliked being associated with the term "Impressionist", which the press had coined and popularized, and insisted on including non-Impressionist artists such as Jean-Louis Forain and Jean-François Raffaëlli in the group's exhibitions. The resulting rancor within the group contributed to its disbanding in 1886.Armstrong 1991, p. 25
As his financial situation improved through sales of his own work, he was able to indulge his passion for collecting works by artists he admired: old masters such as El Greco and such contemporaries as Manet, Cassatt, Pissarro, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Édouard Brandon. Three artists he idolized, Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier, were especially well represented in his collection."In the final inventory of his collection, there were twenty paintings and eighty-eight drawings by Ingres, thirteen paintings and almost two hundred drawings by Delacroix. There were hundreds of lithographs by Daumier. His contemporaries were well represented—with the exception of Monet, by whom he had nothing." Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 37
In the late 1880s, Degas also developed a passion for photography.Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 26 He photographed many of his friends, often by lamplight, as in his double portrait of Renoir and Mallarmé. Other photographs, depicting dancers and nudes, were used for reference in some of Degas's drawings, and paintings.Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 34
As the years passed, Degas became isolated, due in part to his belief that a painter could have no personal life.Canaday 1969, p. 929 The Dreyfus Affair controversy brought his antisemitic leanings to the fore and he broke with all his Jewish friends.Guillaud and Guillaud 1985, p. 56 His argumentative nature was deplored by Renoir, who said of him: "What a creature he was, that Degas! All his friends had to leave him; I was one of the last to go, but even I couldn't stay till the end."Bade and Degas 1992, p. 6
After 1890, Degas's eyesight, which had long troubled him, deteriorated further.Baumann, et al. 1994, p. 99. Although he is known to have been working in pastel as late as the end of 1907, and is believed to have continued making sculptures as late as 1910, he apparently ceased working in 1912, when the impending demolition of his longtime residence on the rue Victor Massé forced him to move to quarters on the Boulevard de Clichy.Thomson 1988, p. 211 He never married, and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, restlessly wandering the streets of Paris before dying in September 1917.Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 41
Artistic style
Degas is often identified as an Impressionist, an understandable but insufficient description. Impressionism originated in the 1860s and 1870s and grew, in part, from the realism of painters such as Courbet and Corot. The Impressionists painted the realities of the world around them using bright, "dazzling" colors, concentrating primarily on the effects of light, and hoping to infuse their scenes with immediacy. They wanted to express their visual experience in that exact moment.Clay 1973, p. 28.
Technically, Degas differs from the Impressionists in that he continually belittled their practice of painting en plein air.Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 11
You know what I think of people who work out in the open. If I were the government I would have a special brigade of gendarmes to keep an eye on artists who paint landscapes from nature. Oh, I don't mean to kill anyone; just a little dose of bird-shot now and then as a warning.Vollard, Ambroise, Degas: an intimate portrait, Crown, New York, 1937, p. 56
"He was often as anti-impressionist as the critics who reviewed the shows", according to art historian Carol Armstrong; as Degas himself explained, "no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and of the study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know nothing."Armstrong 1991, p. 22 Nonetheless, he is described more accurately as an Impressionist than as a member of any other movement. His scenes of Parisian life, his off-center compositions, his experiments with color and form, and his friendship with several key Impressionist artists—most notably Mary Cassatt and Manet—all relate him intimately to the Impressionist movement.Roskill 1983, p. 33