Edgar Degas

• 1. Introduction

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  Edgar Degas was born on the 19th of July 1834 in Paris, under the full name Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas. He later adopted the simpler spelling himself, a quiet act of self-invention that suited a man who spent his life reshaping how art captured the world in motion. By the time he died on the 27th of September 1917, more than half of everything he had ever made depicted dancers. That single fact raises a question worth sitting with: how does a man trained to paint ancient battles and biblical scenes end up fixated, for decades, on the backstage world of the Paris Opera?

  The answer runs through a financial crisis, a chance encounter with Edouard Manet in the Louvre, a deteriorating pair of eyes, and a stubborn refusal to call himself what everyone else called him. Degas despised the label "Impressionist" and preferred to be known as a realist. Yet he helped organize the very exhibitions that gave Impressionism its identity. He spent years collecting works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne. He photographed his friends by lamplight. He mastered oil, pastel, etching, lithography, monotype, and sculpture, and he kept nearly all of his three-dimensional work hidden from the public for his entire life.

  The story ahead will move through all of it: the family roots stretching from Paris to Haiti to New Orleans, the early ambitions that bent sharply toward modern life, the strange and close friendship with Mary Cassatt, the single sculpture he showed the world while alive, and the deepening isolation of his final years.

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  Degas's mother, Celestine Musson De Gas, was a Creole from New Orleans, Louisiana, and her own father, Germain Musson, had been born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He settled in New Orleans in 1810. That American thread in a quintessentially Parisian painter matters, and it would pull Degas across the Atlantic decades later.

  His formal schooling began at eleven when he enrolled in the Lycee Louis-le-Grand. His mother died when he was thirteen, and for the rest of his youth the shaping figures were his banker father Augustin and several unmarried uncles. By the time Degas graduated in 1853, at eighteen, with a baccalaureat in literature, he had already converted a room in the family home into a painting studio. His father wanted him in law school. Degas enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris in November 1853 but put almost no effort into it.

  The decisive break came in 1855. Degas met Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whom he revered above almost any other artist, and Ingres gave him 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." That same April, Degas was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he studied under Louis Lamothe following the style of Ingres.

  In July 1856, Degas left for Italy and stayed three years. In 1858, while staying with his aunt's family in Naples, he made the first studies for The Bellelli Family. He filled sketchbooks with copies of Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and other Renaissance artists, but in a way that was already distinctly his own: rather than copying a masterwork whole, he isolated a secondary figure or a single head and treated it as its own portrait. That selective attention to the overlooked figure would define his mature work.

• 3. From History Painting to Modern Life

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  Back in Paris by 1859, Degas moved into a studio large enough to finally begin painting The Bellelli Family on the scale he intended for Salon exhibition. That canvas remained unfinished until 1867. Alongside it, he worked on Alexander and Bucephalus, The Daughter of Jephthah, Semiramis Building Babylon, and Young Spartans Exercising. These were the works of a man preparing to be a history painter.

  In 1861, Degas visited his childhood friend Paul Valpincon at Menil-Hubert-en-Exmes and made the first of what would become many studies of horses. The shift was gradual. He exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1865, when the jury accepted Scene of War in the Middle Ages. The painting attracted little attention.

  The following year, his Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey appeared at the 1866 Salon and marked a real turning point toward contemporary subject matter. The artist who nudged that change most decisively was Edouard Manet, whom Degas had met in 1864 under circumstances that may have been invented: a story holds that the two men encountered each other while independently copying the same Diego Velazquez portrait in the Louvre.

  When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Degas enlisted in the National Guard to help defend Paris. During rifle training, examiners found his eyesight defective. That discovery, unremarkable at the time, would shadow the rest of his life. After the war, in 1872, Degas traveled to New Orleans and stayed at the home of his Creole uncle Michel Musson on Esplanade Avenue. One painting from that trip, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, became the only work purchased by a museum during Degas's lifetime. The buyer was the museum in Pau.

  Degas returned to Paris in 1873. His father died the year after, and Degas then discovered that his brother Rene had accumulated enormous business debts. To protect the family name, Degas sold both his house and an inherited art collection to cover the debts. For the first time in his life, he depended on selling his own work to live. That pressure coincided, not accidentally, with the decade beginning in 1874, during which he produced much of his greatest work.

• 4. The Impressionist Exhibitions

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  Between 1874 and 1886, a group of artists that became known as the Impressionists mounted eight independent exhibitions outside the Salon. Degas took a leading role in organizing them and showed his work in all but one. He also hated almost everything the movement stood for in practice.

  He mocked his colleagues Monet and the other landscape painters for working outdoors. Of plein air painters, Degas said he would have the government send a special brigade of gendarmes to fire birdshot at them as a warning. His own explanation of his method was equally blunt: "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."

  He disliked the term "Impressionist" so much that he pushed to include non-Impressionist painters such as Jean-Louis Forain and Jean-Francois Raffaelli in the group shows. He abhorred the publicity his colleagues courted. The rancor that built from these conflicts contributed to the group disbanding in 1886. Art historian Carol Armstrong noted that he was "often as anti-impressionist as the critics who reviewed the shows."

  As his finances recovered through sales, Degas indulged an expansive collecting habit. He acquired works by El Greco, Manet, Cassatt, Pissarro, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Edouard Brandon. Three figures he especially idolized, Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier, were particularly well represented. In the late 1880s, he also developed a serious interest in photography, photographing friends by lamplight, including a double portrait of Renoir and Mallarme. Some of those photographs of dancers and nudes he then used as reference material for paintings.

• 5. The Craft Across Many Media

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  Mlle. Fiocre in the Ballet La Source, which Degas exhibited at the 1868 Salon, was his first major work to introduce the subject that would define him. From 1870, he painted ballet subjects with increasing frequency, partly because they sold and provided the income he now needed after his brother's debts had left the family in financial ruin.

  Pastel became central to his practice in the later 1870s. He applied it in complex layers and textures that let him reconcile his gift for line with a growing hunger for expressive color. Around the same time, he returned to etching after a ten-year gap, guided at first by his old friend Ludovic-Napoleon Lepic, an innovator in the medium. He also began experimenting with lithography and monotype, eventually producing some 300 monotypes across two periods: the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s, and again in the early 1890s. He was especially drawn to the effects that monotype produced and frequently worked back over the printed images with pastel.

  By 1880, sculpture had become another strand in his exploration. He had early shown a cropping instinct that art historians find already visible in paintings like The Bellelli Family and Young Spartans Exercising, where he placed figures at unusual angles and cut them at the frame's edge. That same instinct shaped The Orchestra at the Opera (c. 1870), in which he painted his bassoonist friend Desire Dihau as one of fourteen musicians in the pit. Looking down from that vantage, the audience sees only the legs and tutus of the dancers above, the rest of their bodies sliced off by the canvas edge. Art historian Charles Stuckey compared the viewpoint to a distracted spectator during a random glance.

  Degas described his own tendency this way: "In art, nothing should look like chance, not even movement." Yet his mature work is also marked by conspicuously unfinished passages even in otherwise tightly rendered paintings. He admitted a predilection "to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them." He also cared deeply about how his works were framed, patronizing a framer named Pierre Cluzel and often insisting on his own framing choices as a condition of sale.

• 6. The Little Dancer and Hidden Sculpture

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  In 1881, at the sixth Impressionist exhibition, Degas showed the only sculpture he would ever publicly display during his lifetime. The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years was nearly life-size, made of wax, dressed in a cloth tutu, and fitted with real hair. The model was Marie van Goethem. Critics found its realism extraordinary, but most denounced the dancer as ugly.

  J.-K. Huysmans wrote in a review: "The terrible reality of this statuette evidently produces uneasiness in the spectators; all their notions about sculpture, about those cold inanimate whitenesses... are here overturned. The fact is that with his first attempt Monsieur Degas has revolutionized the traditions of sculpture as he has long since shaken the conventions of painting."

  What no one at the 1881 exhibition knew was that Degas had been making sculpture for years and would continue for decades. After his death in 1917, his heirs found 150 wax sculptures in his studio, many in disrepair. They consulted foundry owner Adrien Hebrard, who concluded that 74 of the waxes could be cast in bronze. The Hebrard Foundry carried out that work from 1919 until 1936, closing in 1937, shortly before Hebrard died.

  Degas himself had been clear about what sculpture meant to him: "Drawing is a way of thinking, modelling another." He assigned the same intellectual weight to both. In 2004, a group of 73 plaster casts was presented as having been discovered among materials bought by the Airaindor Foundry from Hebrard's descendants. Bronzes cast from those plasters were issued between 2004 and 2016 in editions of inconsistent and unknown size. Most recognized Degas scholars have declined to comment on whether those plasters are authentic.

• 7. Mary Cassatt and the Prints Journal

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  In 1877, Degas invited Mary Cassatt to exhibit in the third Impressionist exhibition. He had noticed a portrait she called Ida when it appeared at the 1874 Salon. The two formed a friendship that would last until his death. They had much in common: affluent backgrounds, study in Italy, a commitment to figure painting, and a shared refusal of marriage.

  Cassatt's parents and her sister Lydia moved to Paris in 1877, and soon Degas, Cassatt, and Lydia could often be found together at the Louvre studying paintings. Degas produced two prints of notable technical innovation showing Cassatt examining artworks while Lydia reads a guidebook beside her. Those prints were intended for a journal planned by Degas in collaboration with Cassatt and Camille Pissarro. The journal never appeared.

  Their closest period of collaboration ran through the fall and winter of 1879-80, when Cassatt was mastering printmaking. Degas owned a small printing press, and she worked at his studio each day using his tools and equipment. Then in April 1880, Degas abruptly withdrew from the prints journal. Without him, the project collapsed. Cassatt never worked with him that closely again, though they continued to visit until his death.

  Cassatt posed for Degas frequently, including for his millinery series. Around 1884, he made Mary Cassatt Seated, Holding Cards in oils. Art historian Stephanie Strasnick suggests the cards in the painting are probably cartes de visite, used by artists and dealers to document their work. Cassatt's view of the portrait was unambiguous. She later wrote to her dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, in 1912 or 1913, that "I would not want it known that I posed for it." She thought it made her look like "a repugnant person."

  For her part, Cassatt helped Degas sell his paintings and promoted his reputation in the United States. Despite their falling-out over the Dreyfus Affair, she later expressed a kind of fond amusement at the irony of Louisine Havemeyer's 1915 joint exhibition of their work being held to benefit women's suffrage.

• 8. Isolation and Final Years

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  Degas believed that "the artist must live alone, and his private life must remain unknown." He cultivated his reputation as a misanthropic bachelor with something close to deliberateness. The novelist George Moore called him an "old curmudgeon." Renoir, one of his last remaining friends, 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."

  The Dreyfus Affair, which divided Paris from the 1890s into the early 1900s, intensified his antisemitism. By the mid-1890s he had broken off relations with all his Jewish friends, publicly disavowed earlier friendships with Jewish artists, and refused to use models he believed might be Jewish. He remained an outspoken antisemite and member of the Anti-Dreyfusards until he died.

  Meanwhile, his eyesight kept deteriorating. He is known to have worked in pastel as late as the end of 1907 and is believed to have continued making sculptures as late as 1910. He apparently stopped working in 1912, when the impending demolition of his longtime residence on the rue Victor Masse forced him to move to the Boulevard de Clichy. He never adapted. He spent the last years of his life nearly blind, wandering the streets of Paris, and died in September 1917.

  The suite of nudes he exhibited at the eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886 had produced, according to the source, "the most concentrated body of critical writing on the artist during his lifetime" and an overall positive and laudatory reaction. Those same late works, created after the Impressionist movement's peak years, are now regarded as the paintings in which he most fully used Impressionist color. The 2023 and 2024 exhibition Manet/Degas, which ran at the Musee d'Orsay and then the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, placed him alongside the artist whose example had redirected his entire career.