Edgar Degas was born in Paris on 19 July 1834 into a wealthy banking family; his father was Augustin De Gas (the painter later dropped the aristocratic particle), a cultivated man who encouraged his son's obsession with art and music. Degas entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1855 and spent the following three years in Italy — Rome, Naples, Florence — copying Mantegna, Holbein, and the Florentine masters with an academic thoroughness that never left him. Back in Paris, he became close to Manet, whose bold, flat treatment of contemporary subjects pushed him toward the immediate world of café, racecourse, and theater. The ballets of the Paris Opéra consumed him from the early 1870s until his death. He had a pass to the rehearsal rooms and backstage corridors, and he used it obsessively — producing approximately 1,500 works depicting dancers, more than any other single subject in the history of art. These were not tributes to grace; they were clinical investigations of bodies under strain, of the labor and repetition that produces the illusion of effortlessness. His vantage points were those of a man with access: the wings, the orchestra pit, the steep view from a box. Influenced by Japanese woodblock prints (which flooded Paris after 1853) and by the newly invented photograph, he mastered cropped, off-center compositions that created the sensation of movement arrested mid-stride. His pastel technique — layers of hatched chalk built up over multiple firings, then reworked again — produces a surface unlike anything in Western art before him. He participated in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, though he rejected the label, preferring to call their shows exhibitions of independent artists. His sculpture, largely unknown in his lifetime, was a parallel obsession: the wax figure of Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, shown at the 1881 Impressionist exhibition complete with a real tutu and hair ribbon, scandalized critics precisely because it looked too real, too unidealized. After 1886 his eyesight began to fail. He worked increasingly in pastel and sculpture — mediums that required less acute vision — and his late works grow more abstract, their coloring more ferocious. By 1908 he was nearly blind, wandering the boulevards of Paris alone. He died on 27 September 1917, aged eighty-three, having outlived almost everyone he had known as a young man. At the auction of his studio contents in 1918, Monet wept. The 150 sculptures cast posthumously from his wax models established him as one of the major sculptors of the nineteenth century alongside Rodin.
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Realist and Impressionist painter · Sculptor · Painter of dancers and modern life
Edgar Degas
1,834 CE – 1,917 CE
The Paris-born master of movement who captured dancers, jockeys, and café-drinkers with a Japanese-influenced eye for cropped angles and restless line.
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