Edgar Degas
Degas moved to a fifth-floor flat at 6 boulevard de Clichy after losing the rue Victor-Masse studio, and died there on 27 September 1917, aged eighty-three and almost blind. A Ville de Paris plaque marks the building.
6 boulevard de Clichy
Still standing
Outside only
Someone else
The apartment where Edgar Degas spent his last five years and died on 27 September 1917, aged eighty-three and almost blind. A Ville de Paris plaque marks the building.
- 6 boulevard de Clichy, 75018 Paris
- Degas lived here from 1912 until his death in 1917
The place, briefly
When Edgar Degas was forced out of his studio on the rue Victor-Massé in 1912, he moved here, to a flat on the fifth floor of 6 boulevard de Clichy. He was seventy-eight. His sight, which had been deteriorating since the 1870s, was by then almost gone.
The last five years were not productive ones. Degas had spent his life working obsessively and now could barely see to do it; friends described him walking the streets of the quarter for hours, an old man in a cape moving between the same few blocks he had known since birth. His birthplace on the rue Saint-Georges is a ten-minute walk from this door.
He died here on 27 September 1917, in the middle of the war, aged eighty-three. What he left behind in the way of work — including the hoard of wax sculptures nobody had known the extent of — was dispersed at a series of sales that took several years and reshaped a number of museum collections.
The Ville de Paris has placed a commemorative plaque on the building. It is private, and the plaque is the whole of what there is to see.
Key facts
- 1912 to 1917
- The fifth
- 27 September 1917, aged eighty-three
- Evicted from the rue Victor-Massé studio in 1912
- By a Ville de Paris commemorative plaque
- Private building — exterior and plaque only
Timeline
Degas moves in after losing the rue Victor-Massé studio.
He dies here on 27 September, nearly blind.
On the map
Questions before you go
Where did Edgar Degas die?
At 6 boulevard de Clichy in the 18th arrondissement, on 27 September 1917. He had lived there since 1912.
Is there anything to see?
A commemorative plaque placed by the Ville de Paris. The building itself is private.
Was Degas blind at the end of his life?
Very nearly. His eyesight had been failing since the 1870s and was almost entirely gone by the time he moved here, which is the main reason the last years produced so little.
People who knew this place
Within walking distance
11 boulevard de Clichy
The building where Picasso took a studio and a comfortable apartment in 1909, looking over the avenue Frochot — the address that marks his move out of the squalor of the Bateau-Lavoir and into something like a bourgeois life.
Visit the place
Le Chat Noir
The legendary Montmartre cabaret where poets, singers, painters, cartoonists and musicians made the room itself an artistic creation — crowned by an extraordinary shadow theater.
Visit the place
Pigalle
The strip along the boulevard de Clichy below Montmartre, where the studios and the cabarets shared a pavement until only the second kind was left.
Visit the placeCafé de la Nouvelle Athènes
The café on the place Pigalle that took over from the Guerbois as the meeting place of Manet, Degas and their circle in the 1870s — and the room behind the painting usually called L'Absinthe.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
Paris, one address at a time.
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.