Edgar Degas

Master painter Edgar Degas – some events in his life

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas, 1834 – 1917),  was a French artist regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist. He is especially identified with the subject of the dance, and over half his works are of dancers. Here he mastered the art of conveying movement in paintings, as also in his racecourse subjects and female nudes. His portraits are considered to be among the finest in the history of art.

In 1855, Degas met the painter Ingres, whom he revered, and whose 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.”  In July 1856, Degas travelled to Italy, where he would remain for the next three years

When he returned to France in 1859, Degas moved into a large studio. He  began work on several history paintings including Young Spartans around 1860. In 1861, Degas  made the earliest of his many studies of horses.

In 1866 and onwards he grew more interested in contemporary subject matter. He was much influenced  by  Édouard Manet, whom he had met in 1864.

Degas disliked being associated with the term “Impressionist”

He is known to have been working in pastel at the end of 1907, and is believed to have continued making sculptures as late as 1910, but he apparently stopped working in 1912. He never married and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, restlessly wandering the streets of Paris. He died in September 1917.

Technically, Degas differs from the Impressionists in that he “never adopted the Impressionist colour fleck”, and he continually belittled their practice of painting in the open air. Degas himself explained, “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.”  However, his scenes of Parisian life, his off-centre compositions, his experiments with colour and form, and his friendship with several key Impressionist artists, especially Édouard Manet, all connect him  to the Impressionist movement.

By the late 1860s, Edgar Degas had changed from painting historical subjects to an observation of contemporary life. Racecourse scenes provided an opportunity to paint horses and their riders in a modern context. He began to paint women at work, milliners and laundresses. He was soon to develop a theme with which he would become especially identified: dancers.

In many  paintings dancers were shown backstage or in rehearsal, emphasizing their status as professionals doing a job. From 1870 Degas increasingly painted ballet subjects. Degas began to paint café life as well,

Degas’s mature style is distinguished by conspicuously unfinished passages in his paintings. He frequently blamed his eye troubles for his inability to finish. He said once that his tendency was “to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them”, and he was always reluctant to consider a painting complete.

His interest in portraiture led Degas to study carefully the ways in which a person’s social stature or form of employment may be revealed by their physiognomy, posture, dress, and other attributes.

By the later 1870s Edgar Degas had mastered not only the traditional medium of oil on canvas, but pastel as well. The dry medium, which he applied in complex layers and textures, enabled him more easily to combine his facility for line with expressive colour.

In the mid-1870s he also returned to the medium of etching, which he had neglected for ten years. He was especially fascinated by the effects produced by monotype and often reworked the printed images with pastel. By 1880, sculpture had become one more strand to Degas’s continuing search to explore different media, although he made few sculptures.

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