Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas was one of the founders of the independent exhibitions of 1874 to 1886, the shows that gave Impressionism its name, and he showed in seven of the eight while refusing the name itself. He preferred to be called a realist, or simply an independent. More than half of his work depicts ballet dancers, and the rest maps the modern Paris he watched at close range: laundresses, milliners, café-concert singers, racehorses at Longchamp.

A banking family and the Old Masters

He was born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas in Paris on 19 July 1834, the eldest son of a banker, Augustin De Gas, and Célestine Musson De Gas, a Creole from New Orleans. He studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, took his baccalauréat in literature in 1853, and registered as a copyist at the Louvre. A brief enrollment in law school gave way to drawing lessons under Louis Lamothe, a follower of Ingres, and admission to the École des Beaux-Arts in 1855.[1]

In July 1856 he left for Italy and stayed three years, copying in Florence, Rome, and Naples and beginning The Bellelli Family, a portrait of his aunt's household in Florence. Back in Paris he attempted history painting in the academic manner: Young Spartans Exercising and Sémiramis Building Babylon date from around 1860. Within a decade he had set the genre aside.[2]

Modern subjects

From the late 1860s Degas turned to contemporary life, and the subjects he chose stayed with him for the rest of his career. He painted the Opera's dance classes and wings rather than its performances, and worked the same ground in series:[3]

• Ballet dancers rehearsing, resting, and waiting — more than half of his mature output
• Laundresses and milliners at work
• Café-concert singers under gaslight
• Racehorses and jockeys before the start
• Women bathing, in the late pastels

A visit to his mother's family in New Orleans in 1872–73 produced a painting of the family cotton office, which in 1878 became the first work by any of the independents to be bought by a museum.

The independent exhibitions

In 1874 Degas was among the founding members of the independent exhibiting society, beside Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, at the first exhibition that earned the group its unwanted name. He took a leading role in organizing the shows and appeared in seven of the eight held between 1874 and 1886, arguing throughout for a broader label than the one the critics had supplied. Édouard Manet, the admired elder of the circle, declined to show with them at all.[4]

His closest working relationship in the group was with Mary Cassatt, the American painter he met in 1877 and invited to join the independents. He introduced her to pastel and printmaking, and by her own account he worked directly on her painting Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, adding the corner detail of the room. The friendship lasted, with interruptions, nearly forty years. He also remained a colleague of Pierre-Auguste Renoir through the exhibitions and the circle around the Manet family; in December 1895 Degas photographed Renoir beside the poet Stéphane Mallarmé at the apartment of Julie Manet, Berthe Morisot's daughter.[5]

The Little Dancer and the sculptures

At the sixth exhibition, in April 1881, Degas showed the only sculpture he ever exhibited in public: Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, a nearly life-size figure in tinted wax, dressed in a real bodice, a cloth tutu, ballet slippers, and a wig of human hair. The model was Marie van Goethem, a young student at the Paris Opera's dance school. Most critics found the realism startling and the girl ugly.[2]

The first truly modern attempt at sculpture I know.

Degas kept modeling in wax for the rest of his life, mostly dancers and horses, and never exhibited another one. Roughly 150 wax figures were found in his studio after his death; the Hébrard foundry began casting them in bronze in 1919, which is how the Little Dancer and the rest reached the museums.[6]

The Dreyfus affair and the last years

When the Dreyfus affair divided Paris in the 1890s, Degas sided with the army against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer wrongly convicted of treason, and by the mid-1890s he had broken off relations with his Jewish friends. The break that contemporaries recorded most fully was with the Halévy family. Degas had dined at the home of the writer Ludovic Halévy on Thursdays for decades, and Ludovic's son Daniel grew up idolizing him. In the autumn of 1897, with the household firmly Dreyfusard, Degas sat silent through a last dinner, left, and never returned; Daniel Halévy recorded the evening in his diary. He also broke with Camille Pissarro, a Dreyfusard, and dismissed a model from his studio for doubting Dreyfus's guilt, telling her she must be Jewish. She was not.[7]

In 1895 he had taken up photography, posing friends in lamplit interiors and turning the camera on himself. His eyesight, defective since at least the 1870s, deteriorated badly after 1890, and the late work is dominated by large pastels, their color broader and their drawing looser as his vision narrowed. He never married, holding that an artist's private life should stay unknown, and spent his last years nearly blind.

Degas died at his Paris apartment on 27 September 1917, at eighty-three. He is buried in the family vault in Montmartre Cemetery.[8]

Not an Impressionist

Degas helped organise the independent exhibitions and showed in seven of the eight, but he rejected the word Impressionist for the whole of his life and objected to its use on the posters.[4]

His reasons were practical rather than pedantic. He did not paint outdoors, did not much care about weather or changing light, and worked from drawings and memory in the studio like the Old Masters he had copied in Italy. He preferred to call himself a realist, or simply an independent.

He also wanted the exhibitions to be something other than a house style. He pushed for other artists to be included, quarrelled with Monet and Renoir about who could show, and by the 1880s the arguments over admissions were doing as much as anything to pull the group apart.

Pastel, monotype and the bathers

From the 1880s Degas worked increasingly in pastel rather than oil, and the late work is mostly pastel over other media, built up in layers, steamed and reworked and fixed between coats.[6]

He was also one of the few major painters to take up monotype: ink drawn or wiped on a metal plate and printed once, giving a single smoky image which he then worked into with pastel. He made hundreds, including a series set in brothels.

The subject he returned to most in the last decades is women washing. The bathers crouch in tubs, dry their necks, comb out their hair, and are seen from above and behind at close range. Degas said he showed them as though through a keyhole, and the pictures have been argued over on exactly those grounds ever since.

The collection and the studio sales

Degas spent a great deal of his money on other people's work. He owned paintings by Ingres and Delacroix, whom he revered, and by El Greco, Manet, Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, along with thousands of prints and drawings. He kept most of it in stacks, largely unhung.

He also stopped working several years before he died, and the studio filled with what he had never sold or finished, including the wax sculptures of dancers and horses he had modelled but never exhibited.

Both were dispersed after his death in 1917. The collection was auctioned in March 1918, while Paris was being shelled, and buyers got in cheaply: John Maynard Keynes and Charles Holmes bought thirteen paintings for London and came home with a large part of their grant unspent. The four studio sales of Degas's own work, running through 1918 and 1919, were a different matter, and the prices there put his work into museums across the world that had never held one.[9]