I.

Introduction

Edgar Degas (1834-1917), French painter and sculptor, known especially for his paintings of ballet dancers. Other subjects that he frequently returned to include horse races, women bathing, and portraits of friends and relatives. Degas combined a modern focus on the creation of unusual compositions and the rendering of movement with a traditional emphasis on skillful drawing. An accomplished sculptor as well as painter, he molded, in wax and clay, exquisite small statues of dancers, female bathers, and horses in motion.

Degas is usually classed with the impressionists, but he stood somewhat apart from the other artists in this group. He did not share the impressionists’ fascination with natural light and its effects, and he disliked painting directly from nature, preferring instead to work in the studio. Moreover, Degas had little interest in landscape—the primary subject matter of the impressionists—and concentrated instead on the human figure. Also unlike the impressionists, Degas was interested in drawing and emphasized line in his work. However, Degas showed his work in seven of the eight exhibitions that the impressionists organized between 1874 and 1886. See also Impressionism.

II.

Degas’s Life

Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas was born into a prosperous, upper-middle-class family in Paris, France. After a good education, he began training to be a lawyer, but he spent most of his time at the Louvre Museum in Paris, looking at pictures. Degas’s father, impressed with his son’s obvious devotion to art, allowed him to abandon his legal studies.

In 1855 Edgar Degas enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Paris. Although he studied there only briefly, he stayed long enough to benefit from the instruction of Louis Lamothe, a disciple of the then-famous French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Degas greatly admired Ingres’s emphasis on line, especially outline. Degas also learned by copying paintings of the Old Masters, in the Louvre and in Italy. Degas had relatives in Italy and spent a considerable amount of time there between 1855 and 1859.

In 1862 Degas met French painter Édouard Manet. Through Manet, Degas was introduced to the group of artists who later became known as impressionists. Under Manet’s influence Degas began finding his subject matter in the city life around him. Degas was the first of the impressionists to receive public acclaim, in part because the clarity of his drawing made his work seem less revolutionary than the other members of the group. Following the death of his father in 1874, Degas was forced for the first time to make a living from his art. Until then, he had held on to most of his work.

During the 1880s Degas’s eyesight began to fail, and he gradually became semireclusive. One of his ongoing friendships was with Henri Rouart, an engineer, art collector, and amateur artist. Rouart’s death in 1912 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 increased Degas’s sense of loneliness and loss. Degas died in 1917, a sad and lonely man. In addition to his own paintings and sculpture, he left behind a sizable collection of prints, drawings, and 19th-century paintings, including works by Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, and Paul Gauguin.

III.

Degas’s Work

Degas’s early paintings consisted mainly of portraits (see portraiture) and historical subjects. Almost all of the early portraits are of friends and family, and they culminate in the group painting of the Bellelli Family (1858-1860, Musée d’Orsay, Paris)—Degas’s aunt, her husband, and their two daughters. The placement of the figures within the room, along with their gestures and glances, subtly indicates the relationships—and the tensions—between them. None of the family members make eye contact; Mr. Bellelli, isolated at one side of the painting, sits with his back to the viewer.

From the early 1860s on, Degas was attracted by theatrical subjects, and most of his works depict people as he saw them in theaters, cafés, music halls, rehearsal halls, drawing rooms, or boudoirs. Degas was a keen observer of humanity—particularly of women, with whom his work is preoccupied—and in his portraits as well as in his studies of dancers, milliners, and laundresses, he attempted to catch his subjects in poses as natural and spontaneous as those recorded in action photographs. Yet his art was anything but spontaneous. He carefully considered the pose, gestures, and placement of every figure, and he created numerous preliminary sketches before starting to paint.

Degas’s study of Japanese prints led him to experiment with unusual vantage points and asymmetrical compositions (see Japanese Art and Architecture). For example, some of his ballet scenes show dancers from overhead angles or from the wings of the stage. Among his daring off-center compositions is Woman with Chrysanthemums (1865, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), in which the female subject of the picture is pushed into a corner of the canvas by a large, central bouquet of flowers. His subjects often appear abruptly cut off at the edges, as in Ballet Rehearsal (1876, Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum) or Fin d’arabesque (End of an Arabesque, 1877, Musée d’Orsay). Like Fin d’arabesque many of his compositions feature strong diagonal lines.

Degas also experimented a good deal with technique. He tried various printmaking methods, and in his paintings he sometimes used unusual combinations of media, such as pastel or crayon with tempera paint. As he began to lose his sight in the 1880s, Degas increasingly worked in pastels as they were less demanding than oil paint. His pastels are usually simple compositions containing one or two figures. In these works Degas depended on vibrant colors and meaningful gestures rather than on precise lines and careful detailing. He went over outlines again and again in heavy charcoal, and he blended his pinks, purples, and greens to create brilliant color.

From the 1880s on Degas also made sculptures in wax. His poor eyesight mattered less when he could work by touch in this malleable medium. The subjects of his sculpture were the same he had chosen for his paintings: ballet dancers, women in the bath, and racehorses. In his sculpture, as in his paintings, he attempted to catch the action of the moment, and his ballet dancers and female nudes are depicted in poses that make no attempt to conceal their subjects’ physical exertions. One of his best-known sculptures is Petite Danseuse de Quartorze Ans (The Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen, 1880-1881, Tate Gallery, London). Degas enhanced the lifelike quality of the wax figure by giving her a hair ribbon of satin and a gauze tutu. After Degas’s death, some of his wax sculptures, including the Little Dancer, were cast in bronze.