53 Facts About Degas

Edgar Degas was a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings.

Degas is especially identified with the subject of dance; more than half of his works depict dancers.

Degas was a superb draftsman, and particularly masterly in depicting movement, as can be seen in his rendition of dancers and bathing female nudes.

Degas's portraits are notable for their psychological complexity and their portrayal of human isolation.

At the beginning of his career, Degas wanted to be a history painter, a calling for which he was well prepared by his rigorous academic training and close study of classical art.

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Degas was born in Paris, France, into a moderately wealthy family.

Degas's maternal grandfather Germain Musson, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, of French descent, and had settled in New Orleans in 1810.

Degas began his schooling at age eleven, enrolling in the Lycee Louis-le-Grand.

Degas's mother died when he was thirteen, and the main influences on him for the remainder of his youth were his father and several unmarried uncles.

Degas duly enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris in November 1853 but applied little effort to his studies.

Degas studied drawing there with Louis Lamothe, under whose guidance he flourished, following the style of Ingres.

In July 1856, Degas traveled to Italy, where he would remain for the next three years.

Degas drew and painted numerous copies of works by Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and other Renaissance artists, but—contrary to conventional practice—he usually selected from an altarpiece a detail that had caught his attention: a secondary figure, or a head which he treated as a portrait.

In 1861, Degas visited his childhood friend Paul Valpincon in Normandy, and made the earliest of his many studies of horses.

Degas exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1865, when the jury accepted his painting Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which attracted little attention.

Degas returned to Paris in 1873 and his father died the following year, whereupon Degas learned that his brother Rene had amassed enormous business debts.

Degas took a leading role in organizing the exhibitions, and showed his work in all but one of them, despite his persistent conflicts with others in the group.

Degas had little in common with Monet and the other landscape painters in the group, whom he mocked for painting outdoors.

Degas deeply disliked being associated with the term "Impressionist", which the press had coined and popularized, and insisted on including non-Impressionist artists such as Jean-Louis Forain and Jean-Francois Raffaelli in the group's exhibitions.

Degas photographed many of his friends, often by lamplight, as in his double portrait of Renoir and Mallarme.

Degas never married, and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, restlessly wandering the streets of Paris before dying in September 1917.

Degas is often identified as an Impressionist, an understandable but insufficient description.

Degas's style reflects his deep respect for the old masters and his great admiration for Ingres and Delacroix.

Degas was a collector of Japanese prints, whose compositional principles influenced his work, as did the vigorous realism of popular illustrators such as Daumier and Gavarni.

Degas began to paint women at work, milliners and laundresses.

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From 1870 Degas increasingly painted ballet subjects, partly because they sold well and provided him with needed income after his brother's debts had left the family bankrupt.

Degas began to paint cafe life as well, in works such as L'Absinthe and Singer with a Glove.

Degas had attended their trial with sketchbook in hand, and his numerous drawings of the defendants reveal his interest in the atavistic features thought by some 19th-century scientists to be evidence of innate criminality.

Degas produced some 300 monotypes over two periods, from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s and again in the early 1890s.

Degas was especially fascinated by the effects produced by monotype and frequently reworked the printed images with pastel.

Degas began to draw and paint women drying themselves with towels, combing their hair, and bathing .

Degas always painted indoors, preferring to work in his studio from memory, photographs, or live models.

Degas's only showing of sculpture during his life took place in 1881 when he exhibited The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years.

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.

Degas created a substantial number of other sculptures during a span of four decades, but they remained unseen by the public until a posthumous exhibition in 1918.

Degas scholars have agreed that the sculptures were not created as aids to painting, although the artist habitually explored ways of linking graphic art and oil painting, drawing and pastel, sculpture and photography.

Degas assigned the same significance to sculpture as to drawing: "Drawing is a way of thinking, modelling another".

Degas, who believed that "the artist must live alone, and his private life must remain unknown", lived an outwardly uneventful life.

Degas was characterized as an "old curmudgeon" by the novelist George Moore, and he deliberately cultivated his reputation as a misanthropic bachelor.

Degas remained an outspoken anti-Semite and member of the anti-Semitic "Anti-Dreyfusards" until his death.

Degas soon joined forces with the Impressionists and rejected the rigid rules and judgments of the Salon.

Degas's work was controversial, but was generally admired for its draftsmanship.

In 1877, Degas invited Mary Cassatt to exhibit in the third Impressionist exhibition.

Degas had admired a portrait she exhibited in the Salon of 1874, and the two formed a friendship.

Degas produced two prints, notable for their technical innovation, depicting Cassatt at the Louvre looking at artworks while Lydia reads a guidebook.

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Degas introduced Cassatt to pastel and engraving, while for her part Cassatt was instrumental in helping Degas sell his paintings and promoting his reputation in America.

Degas owned a small printing press, and by day she worked at his studio using his tools and press.

However, in April 1880, Degas abruptly withdrew from the prints journal they had been collaborating on, and without his support the project folded.

Around 1884, Degas made a portrait in oils of Cassatt, Mary Cassatt Seated, Holding Cards.

Cassatt later expressed satisfaction at the irony of Lousine Havermeyer's 1915 joint exhibition of hers and Degas' work being held in aid of women's suffrage, equally capable of affectionately repeating Degas' antifemale comments as being estranged by them .

In spite of suggestions that Degas was a misogynist, he was not only a friend of Mary Cassatt, he was a friend and admirer of Suzanne Valadon.

Degas was the first person to purchase her art, and he taught her soft-ground etching.

Degas wrote her several letters, most asking her to come see him with her drawings.