Modern Age
Edgar Degas (1834–1917)
French Impressionism painter.
Edgar Degas was the great draughtsman of the Impressionist circle and its most reluctant member. Born to a well-off Parisian banking family, he trained in the tradition of Ingres — worshipping line above color — and spent formative years in Italy copying the Old Masters. He helped found and organize the independent exhibitions of the 1870s and 1880s, showing in seven of the eight, yet he detested the label 'Impressionist' and preferred to call himself a 'realist' or simply an independent. Nearly everything the public thinks of as spontaneous in his art was, he insisted, the product of study, memory, and relentless reworking.
His true subjects were modern Parisian bodies in motion and at rest: ballet dancers rehearsing and waiting in the wings, racehorses parading before the start, laundresses, milliners, café singers, and women washing themselves, seen as if by accident through a half-open door. He composed like no one before him — figures cropped by the frame, floors tilting up, empty space thrust into the center — lessons he drew from photography and from the Japanese prints then flooding Paris. He was also the medium's great experimenter: a virtuoso of pastel, which he built up in dense, fixed, luminous layers, and of monotype and wax sculpture.
As his eyesight failed from the 1880s onward, Degas worked ever larger and rougher, in blazing pastel and in modelled wax, groping toward form more by touch than by sight. He mentored the American Mary Cassatt, whom he invited to exhibit with the independents, and he died in Paris in 1917, half-blind and solitary, having quietly become one of the hinges between the old art of drawing and the new art of the modern instant.
The words the record keeps using: incisive, observant, unsentimental, modern, detached, restless.
At a glance
- Lived 1834–1917
- Origin French
- Worked in Paris
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Impressionism
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Pastel, Cast brass and bronze
Works in the archive
- The Dance Class, 1873 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
A rehearsal room in the old Paris Opéra, where the aged ballet master Jules Perrot leans on his stick amid a crowd of young dancers who stretch, scratch, fidget, and wait. Degas shows the labor behind the spectacle… - In a Café (L'Absinthe), 1875 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
A woman and a man sit side by side at a café table, a glass of the pale-green spirit absinthe before her, both sunk in separate silences. The models were the actress Ellen Andrée and the artist Marcellin Desboutin, but… - At the Races (Gentlemen Jockeys before the Start), 1877 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
Amateur jockeys walk their nervous mounts across an open field before a race, a carriage waiting at the right and a pale industrial horizon beyond. The racecourse gave Degas, like the ballet, a modern arena of trained… - Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, 1878 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
Degas's only sculpture exhibited in his lifetime, shown at the 1881 Impressionist exhibition. The original was modelled in pigmented wax and dressed with a real bodice, tutu, and hair ribbon — a shocking hybrid of art… - The Tub, 1886 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
A naked woman crouches in a shallow tin tub, sponging the back of her neck, seen from a high, oblique angle as though glimpsed unawares. Part of Degas's great pastel series of bathers shown at the last Impressionist…
What was said
Degas maintained that no art was less spontaneous than his: what looked like a caught moment was in fact the result of reflection, drawing, and the study of the great masters, executed in the studio rather than before the motif — the ground on which he kept his distance from the 'Impressionist' label.
Degas held that drawing is not the form itself but the way of seeing the form, and he subordinated color to line throughout his career — a conviction Paul Valéry recorded from years of conversations with him.
Degas reportedly said that people called him the painter of dancers without understanding that the dancer was for him a pretext for painting movement and beautiful fabrics; the body in motion, not the anecdote of the ballet, was his real subject.
Lineage
Learned from Édouard Manet
Passed on to Mary Cassatt
What would Edgar make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Edgar Degas", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Edgar · Keep a life moment the way Edgar would · Pictures made after Edgar