Edgar Degas Biography Quotes 10 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas was born on 19 July 1834 in Paris, in a France still rearranging itself after revolution and empire, where bourgeois stability and modern spectacle grew side by side. His father, Auguste De Gas, was a banker with ties to Naples; his mother, Celestine Musson, came from a Creole family with roots in New Orleans. The household moved easily between money, music, and cultivated conversation, and Degas absorbed the sense that art was both a calling and a discipline, not merely an ornament.

His mother died when he was thirteen, a loss that tightened his inwardness and sharpened his reliance on observation. Paris offered him a daily theater: new boulevards, gaslight, cafes, shop windows, and the choreography of crowds. From the beginning, he was drawn less to pastoral reverie than to the hard edges of the real - bodies at work, rituals of leisure, and the quiet strain behind public poise.

Education and Formative Influences

Degas studied at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand and briefly entered the Faculty of Law in Paris, but his true education unfolded in museums and studios. He trained with Louis Lamothe, a student of Ingres, and copied relentlessly at the Louvre, apprenticing himself to line, structure, and the authority of the old masters - especially Ingres, Delacroix, and later the severe classicism he found in Italy. Travel in Italy in the late 1850s deepened his command of draftsmanship and composition; even when his subjects became fiercely modern, his ambitions stayed anchored in the tradition of history painting and portraiture.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

By the 1860s Degas was exhibiting at the Salon and painting portraits and ambitious scenes, including the early family epic "The Bellelli Family" (1858-67), where psychological distance is staged with architectural clarity. The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune marked a harsher decade; Degas served in the National Guard, and afterward his art turned decisively toward contemporary life: ballet rehearsals, racecourses, cafes, laundresses, and milliners. He became a central, if prickly, figure in the Impressionist exhibitions from 1874 onward, though he insisted on the primacy of drawing over plein-air spontaneity. Financial strain after his father's death and the collapse of the family bank pushed him to sell works and produce more systematically. In the 1880s and 1890s he expanded into printmaking and pastel, and he modeled in wax, culminating in the unsettling naturalism of "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen" (exhibited 1881). As his eyesight deteriorated, he worked increasingly from memory and touch; late pastels thicken into near-abstraction, then falter into silence. He died in Paris on 27 September 1917, as World War I remade the city he had chronicled.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Degas built modernity out of discipline. He distrusted the myth of the inspired moment and treated art as a long argument with materials, tradition, and the body. "No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters". That stance was not modesty but method: he engineered the look of immediacy through rehearsed invention, using cropping, oblique viewpoints, and asymmetrical balance learned from photography and Japanese prints. Ballet scenes such as "The Ballet Class" and "The Dance Lesson" are not celebrations of grace alone; they expose repetition, fatigue, and the economics of display - the dancer as worker as much as icon.

His inner life surfaces in his insistence that motion be composed, not merely witnessed. "One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement". Yet the goal was never sterile correctness; he aimed to create a convincing fiction that revealed truth more sharply than literal transcription. "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". Hence the paradox of his nudes and bathers: intimate but unsentimental, often seen from above or behind, as if the viewer has stumbled into a private mechanics of flesh - not romance, but anatomy, habit, and time.

Legacy and Influence

Degas reshaped how artists picture modern life: not as a panoramic manifesto, but as fragments charged with design and psychology. His synthesized realism - classical draftsmanship fused with radical framing and the studio-made "instant" - influenced Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard, and later realist and photographic sensibilities, while his pastels and monotypes anticipated the material freedom of 20th-century drawing. He remains a defining artist of the 19th century precisely because he refused easy categories: an Impressionist who painted indoors, a traditionalist who invented new seeing, and a skeptic whose work, again and again, makes the ordinary unbearable to ignore.