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.