Edgar Degas joined the Law Faculty of the University of Paris in 1853.
Connections
Friend: Paul Gauguin
1893
Paul Gauguin at the Bateau-Lavoir. Photo by Photo12/Universal Images Group.
Mother: Célestine Musson de Gas
Célestine Musson de Gas, Edgar Degas's mother. Photo from the collection of Atelier Degas.
Sister: Marie Thérèse Flavie de Gas
Marie Thérèse Flavie de Gas (later known as Madame Edmond Morbilli), Edgar Degas's sister. Portrait by Edgar Degas.
Sister: Marguerite de Gas
Marguerite de Gas, Edgar Degas's sister. Portrait by Edgar Degas.
Brother: Jean-Baptiste René de Gas
Jean-Baptiste René de Gas, Edgar Degas's brother.
Brother: Achille Hubert de Gas
Achille Hubert de Gas, Edgar Degas's brother. Portrait by Edgar Degas.
Friend: Mary Cassatt
Friend: Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet
Friend: Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Friend: Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic
Artist and patron of arts Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic, Edgar Degas's friend. Dry-point etching by Marcellin-Gilbert Desboutin, from the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.
Edgar Degas was a French artist, sculptor, and printmaker who represented Impressionism. The predominant subject of his pastel drawings and oil paintings was the human, particularly women, shown through such characters as laundresses, cabaret singers, milliners, prostitutes, dancers and ballerinas, his favorite personages.
Background
Ethnicity:
Degas's mother was a Louisiana Creole whose father, born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, had French roots and relocated to New Orleans in 1810.
Edgar Degas was born on July 19, 1834, in Paris, France, to a middle-class family of Augustin de Gas, a banker, and Célestine Musson de Gas. The first-born, Degas had two sisters and two brothers.
Education
Edgar Degas was introduced to arts since early childhood. His mother often performed opera arias and his father organized recitals from time to time.
Degas began his studies at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand where he was sent in 1845. Since the death of his mother two years later which caused him much heartache, Degas was raised by his father who continued to encourage his son to pursue the arts, but not as a long-term career.
After graduating from the Lycée in 1853 with a baccalaureate in literature, Edgar Degas enrolled at the Louvre as a copyist. Following his father's will to see him a lawyer, Degas joined the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris (also known as Sorbonne) in November of that same year but didn't show much interest in the studies.
In 1855, Degas was admitted to the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) where he was taught by Louis Lamothe, one of the pupils of Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres. A year later, Edgar left the Ecole and instead pursued his studies in art while travelling to Italy to visit his relatives.
During three years spent in the country, he discovered the painting and sculpture of antiquity, the trecento, and the Renaissance in the museums and art galleries. He produced many sketches of people and landscapes he saw as well as lots of copies of such great masters as Giotto, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Titian.
Edgar Degas planned to devote his entire life to history painting at the beginning of his creative path. The large portraits of family members and such canvases as The Daughter of Jephthah based on an episode from the Old Testament or Semiramis Building Babylon, both of 1861, are the proof.
The similar historical paintings of the time, Scene of War in the Middle Ages and Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey, submitted to the Paris Salon five years later were almost unnoticed by the audience. The artist dropped historical themes since then which was indicated by the works sent to the Salon of 1868, Édouard Manet and Mme. Manet and The Orchestra of the Opera, portraying Eugénie Fiocre, a ballet star of the time. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Degas served in the artillery of the National Guard and painted less.
The visit of his relatives in New Orleans in 1872-1873, including his uncle who owned a cotton business, resulted in a series of important works, one of which, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, became the only to be bought by a museum while the painter was alive.
The return of Edgar Degas to France in 1874 coincided with the first Impressionist Exhibition that took place at the Parisian Café Guerbois. Taking part in this debut show with ten of his works, Degas exhibited his art at all of the subsequent events of the movement until 1886 preferring them to the Paris Salon that he abandoned that same 1874.
The artist produced a significant part of his most celebrated works throughout the 1870s. The multiple paintings and pastels of the racecourse, music hall, café, and ballet created between 1873 and 1883 were inspired by the life of Paris which became Degas's permanent muse at that time. The first experiments with sculpture, including little wax statuettes of horses and a number of figures from other materials, dated to the same period.
By the end of the 1880s, the scenes from the Parisian life that predominated in his previous works gave way to the human figure in quieter milieu, such as the dancer shown waiting to go onstage. Degas gave up oil painting later in life but continued to work with other media, like pastels and photography, yet sculpture became his preferred medium because of his poor eyesight.
In 1890, the artist established a vast studio on the rue Victor Massé and later took up residence in the adjoining apartment where he lived till 1912. After the forced relocation, Edgar Degas abandoned work completely and concentrated on collecting the art of other artists he admired, including Manet, Pissarro, van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Delacroix, and Ingres.
During the 1870s, Edgar Degas supported republicans through the circles of Léon Gambetta. Over the time, he disengaged from this political ideology. Profoundly conservative in his political opinions, Degas opposed all social reforms and found little to admire in such technological advances as the telephone, for example.
By the middle of the same decade, Degas revealed his anti-Semitic views. Siding with those who advocated against Alfred Dreyfus in The Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s to the early 1900s, he confirmed definitively his status of an anti-Semit that he kept till the end of his life. He broke off relations with all his old Jewish friends and colleagues, and for his paintings, he didn't invite models who might be Jewish in his opinion.
Views
Edgar Degas preferred to work in the studio rather than en plein air like many of his contemporaries, including Renoir or Monet. If needed, he used memory or imagination to produce such outdoor scenes.
In fact, cited as one of the pioneers of Impressionism, Degas identified himself more as a realist. Although he shared many of the movement adherents' ideas and recruited more artists to the movement than any other member, he kept the distance from them.
Quotations:
"A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people."
"A picture is something that requires as much trickery, malice, and vice as the perpetration of crime."
"It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory."
"One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement."
"An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.
"No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters."
"Women can never forgive me; they hate me, they feel I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry."
Personality
Edgar Degas merged two parts of his original surname, "de" and "Gas" in one in 1870 in order to have less aristocratic family name.
Degas had a reputation of a wit person among those who knew him but this intelligence could often be brutal. Inward-looking and often self-doubting, the artist was known as a misanthropic bachelor, and the reclusion increased over the years. By the end of his life, it led to important tensions or complete break of relations with many of his friends like Monet and Renoir.
Physical Characteristics:
Edgar Degas's poor eyesight was detected during his military service at the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. He suffered from eye problems throughout his life and became almost completely blind in his last years.
Quotes from others about the person
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, French artist: "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."
Interests
Artists
Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Honoré Daumier, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Brandon
Connections
Edgar never married, but led a colourful life courting many women in his days. One of his famous relationships was with an American painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt, who was also his intimate friend.
Degas' Drawings
Reproduced in this book are 100 of Degas's drawings, including eight in full color. They range from early studies to portraits of Manet, Madame Hertel, Madame Camus, Durnaty, and others to sketches of dancers and nudes, race track scenes, travel scenes, and other works from 1856 to 1900.
2012
Edgar Degas: Drawings and Pastels
Through an examination of the artist's drawings and pastels, Christopher Lloyd reveals the development of Degas's style as well the story of his life, including his complicated relationship with the Impressionists.
Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty
Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this richly illustrated catalogue presents approximately 120 monotypes along with some 60 related works, including paintings, drawings, pastels, sketchbooks and prints. Essays and detailed studies by curators, scholars and conservators explore the creative potency of Degas's rarely seen monotypes, and highlight their impact on his wider practice.
2016
Edgar Degas
Clever illustrations and story lines, together with full-color reproductions of Edgar Degas's actual works, give children a light yet realistic overview of the artist's life and style.
2016
Edgar Degas: The Late Work
Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel, it's the first publication to present a comprehensive overview of the technical diversity and wide range of themes in Degas's oeuvre,
2013
Degas: His Life and Works in 500 Images
A comprehensive reference book on the life and works of Edgar Degas, acknowledged as one of the greatest masters of all time. It offers a fascinating account of the artist's life, education, artistic influences and legacy, set in context of the turbulent social and political times in which he lived.