Degas, Edgar

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Degas, Edgar

Personal

Full name, Hilaire Germaine Edgar De Gas; born July 19, 1834, in Paris, France; died, September 27, 1917, in Paris, France; son of Auguste and Celestine (Musson) De Gas. Education: Attended the Lycee Louis-de-Grand and the Ecole des Beaux-Art.

Career

Artist. Major collections of Degas's work are found in Chicago, IL, New York, NY, Paris, France, d'Orsay, France, Berlin, Germany, Boston, MA, the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London, England, and in Washington, DC.

Writings

Lettres, edited by Marcel Guerin, B. Grasset (Paris, France), 1931, translation published as Letters, B. Cassirer (Oxford, England), 1947.

Huit sonnets, edited by J. Nepveu-Degas, [Paris, France], 1946.

Sidelights

Edgar Degas was a complex artistic genius known for his lively, informal studies of the ballet, horse racing, and working women. He is classed with the French Impressionist school of art because of his concentration on scenes of contemporary life and his desire to capture the transitory moment. Since his death in 1917, the Degas legend has evolved to mythic proportions, describing him as a nearly blind, cross old man. His personality was, in fact, reserved yet witty, unsure of himself and his talent. Although considered to be an Impressionist—indeed, he is credited with helping French painter Edouard Manet (1832-1883) to develop the movement—he resented the label. (Impressionists labored to represent objects in the same way that our eye sees them, often in quick bursts of color and blurry forms.) As Rachel Barnes explained in her introduction to Degas by Degas, while "other members of the group were principally concerned with observing the transient [changing] effects of light and atmosphere on landscape and water, Degas was far more attracted to the urban life of Paris.... He was more interested in recording the human figure in action than in observing natural phenomena." He was inspired by both photography and Japanese prints, which contributed to his exploration of unique compositions and unexpected viewing angles.

A Classical Education

Born Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas in Paris, France, on July 19, 1834, he was the oldest of the five children of Auguste De Gas, a prosperous French and Italian banker from Naples, Italy, and the former Celestine Musson, the American born daughter of a wealthy New Orleans, Louisiana, businessman. Auguste loved art and music and frequently took Edgar to visit the famous French art museum, the Louvre, in Paris. Auguste had his own great collection of art as well, favoring fifteenth century Italian painters. Celestine died when Edgar was thirteen. Sometime after 1870 Edgar Degas took back the original spelling of the family name, Degas.

From an early age Edgar loved books, especially the classics, and was a serious student in high school. Degas received his early education at the Lycee Louis le Grand in Paris. Although a grim and shabby institution, it was nevertheless the most respected school in the country. Its former students include the writers Victor Hugo, Voltaire, and Moliere. At this school, Degas studied Greek, Latin, and rhetoric (the art of speaking or writing effectively), earning his degree in 1853. Earning a degree at that time was difficult and rare. Of his artist contemporaries, only French painter Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) achieved a similar education. Following graduation, Degas enrolled at the Faculte de Droit, half heartedly studying law to please his father. He soon quit to devote himself to art. In 1856 Degas went to Naples, where his sister lived, and eventually he settled in Rome for three years. He admired the Early Christian and medieval masterpieces of Italy, as well as the frescoes, panel paintings, and drawings of the Renaissance masters, many of which he copied. Back in Paris in 1861, he executed a few history paintings (then regarded as the highest branch of painting). Among these was the Daughter of Jephthah (1861), which is based on a melodramatic episode from the Old Testament. He was granted permission from the Louvre to copy works there. He briefly enrolled at another school, the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and studied under Flandrin, a former student of the French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867).

Degas went on an artistic Italian tour in the summer of 1855, visiting his father's family in Naples. There he painted several portraits of family members, notably his grandfather. He also visited Rome, Florence, and Genoa, studying and copying museum works. He met and was greatly influenced by Gustave Moreau, the future teacher of French painters Georges Rouault (1871-1958) and Henri Matisse (1869-1954). Through Moreau, Degas came to appreciate the historical Romanticism of French painter Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863). This interest produced his sweeping paintings Daughter of Jephthah (1859-60) and Semiramis Building Babylon (c. 1861).

After three years Degas finally returned to Paris, where he established a studio on the Left Bank, an area popular with artists. He continued to live with his father, an arrangement that would continue until he was thirty-one. Although Auguste often despaired at his son's slow pace of development, he continued to support and encourage him. In their 1988 book, Degas, Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge pointed out that "few painters can have found parental support so easily or in such a well informed, cultivated form."

In 1861 Degas met Manet in the Louvre. They would later become friends. That same year, on a visit to an old schoolmate, Degas discovered Haras du Pin, a famous horse farm in the Normandy region of northwest France. He was deeply impressed by the lush green landscape and fascinated by the horses. He studied the build of the horses and the details of their movement and produced the first of his racehorse paintings. Representative of this period is Gentleman's Race: Before the Start (1862). Degas also painted portraits in the first half of the 1860s.

The year 1865 was significant in that Degas finally seemed to come to some decisions. That year he finished Self Portrait Saluting, which would be his final self portrait, and moved out of the family apartment at last. He also completed his last historical painting, War Scene in the Middle Ages. Biographer Roy McMullen noted these three developments and suggested in Degas: His Life, Times, and Work, "Although one can think of a plausible [likely] separate explanation for each fact . . . the three taken together suggest the end of identity worries and the emergence, or invention, of an independent persona." Degas submitted War Scene to the 1865 Paris Salon exhibition. Although it was an oil on paper, the committee in charge classified it as a pastel, so it was placed with the miscellaneous drawings. It consequently received no notice from either the public or the critics.

Finds His Artistic Identity

According to McMullen, about this time there swirled a fierce controversy in the art world, over subject matter, style, innovation, history, ideal beauty, and realism. It had its effect on Degas, and while retaining his respect for Ingres and Delacroix, he developed a new focus, finally finding his own artistic identity. Gordon and Forge indicated that in the years between 1865 and 1870, Degas thoroughly redefined himself as an artist. "He had defined a position for himself," they wrote, "that was altogether distinct from that of any of his contemporaries—profoundly traditional in that it was based on studio practice, centered on the human figure, and on a Florentine conception of drawing; innovative in that it looked at every aspect of that tradition from a completely fresh angle." By 1868 Degas had exhibited four times at the Salon. His Laundry Girl, an 1869 pastel, was the first of a long series on working women.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 interrupted Degas's painting. Both he and Manet served in the national guard. Degas visited London, England, in 1871 and again the next year, pursuing exhibiting opportunities with Durand-Ruel, a French art dealer who had temporarily moved his operation to London to escape the war. Durand-Ruel began to buy Degas's work in 1872 and by the end of the year had sold three of the ballet paintings. In the same year, Degas went to New Orleans to visit members of his family, who were in the cotton business.

Degas's father died in 1874, leaving muddled affairs and serious debts. His financial safety net gone, Edgar Degas finally faced the need to really sell his work, and in the next decade he was more active than ever before or after. He was involved in seven of the series of eight Impressionist exhibits and became associated with the movement, although he objected to being classified as an Impressionist. Subjects at this time included women bathing, as well as theater and brothel scenes. He explored printmaking and uses of new mediums such as pastels. He developed his sculpting abilities and became very successful at it. Degas met American artist Mary Cassatt (1845-1926) in 1877 and they became close friends. She appears in several Degas paintings of the period. By 1880 Degas had gathered a respectable group of devoted collectors.

Portraiture was more important for Degas than for any of the other Impressionists. Some of his portraits are among the best produced in Western art since the Renaissance, and many reveal his profound understanding of human nature. In the Belleli Family (1859), a group portrait executed in Naples of his aunt, her husband, and their two daughters, Degas caught the divisions within a family. Belleli's emotional separation from his wife is suggested by his pose and by his physical isolation within the room, as he sits cramped at a fireplace, with his back to the viewer. One of the daughters repeats the triangular form of her mother, who shields her, while the other, shown in a more unstable pose, seems to be divided in her loyalties. Among Degas's other portraits are the very soft Head of a Young Woman (1867), Diego Martelli (1879), and Estelle Musson (1872-1873), the blind wife of Degas's brother Rene, in which the silver and rose tones bring into relief the remote tenderness of the sitter.

By 1870 Degas had abandoned his desire to become a history painter, and he drew his characters instead from the contemporary Parisian scene. While the bourgeois fashionable world of the ballet, theater, and racetrack interested him considerably, he sometimes depicted squalid scenes of dissipation, as in Absinthe (1876). Degas was especially attracted by the spectacle of the ballet with its elegance of costume and scenery, its movement, which was at once spontaneous and restrained, its artificial lighting, and its unusual viewpoints. Usually he depicted the ballerinas off guard, showing them backstage at an awkward moment as they fasten a slipper or droop exhausted after a difficult practice session. He seems to have tried deliberately to strip his dancers of their glamour, to show them without artifice.

On the surface Degas, operating in this candid-camera fashion, fits easily within the confines of impressionism as an art of immediacy and spontaneity. But these scenes of contemporary Parisian life are not at all haphazardly composed: the placement of each detail is calculated in terms of every other to establish balances which are remarkably clever and subtle and which are frequently grasped by the viewer only after considerable study. In Dancers Practicing at the Bar (1877) the perspective of the floorboards is so adjusted and the angle of vision so calculated that a resin shaker at the left of the canvas is able to balance in interest and compositional force the two dancers almost completely to the right of center.

Degas conceived of the human figure as operating within an environmental context, to be manipulated as a prop according to the dictates of greater compositional interest. Eccentricities of poses and cuttings of the figures, which were inspired to a degree by Japanese prints, do not occur accidentally in his paintings. In A Carriage at the Races (1873) the figure in the carriage to the left is cut nearly down the middle. Had Degas shown more of this figure, an obvious and uninteresting symmetry would have been set up with the larger carriage in the right foreground.

Switches From Oils to Pastels

In copying the Old Masters, Degas sometimes attempted to uncover their techniques. For example, when he copied Andrea Mantegna and some of the Venetians, Degas tried to simulate the Venetian method of building up the canvas with layers of cool and warm tones by a series of glazes. From the mid-1870s he worked increasingly in pastel; and in his last years, when his sight was failing, he abandoned oil completely in favor of pastel, which he handled more broadly and with greater freedom than before.

Pastel, for the most part an 18th-century medium, helped Degas produced qualities of airiness and lightness, as in the Ballerina and Lady with Fan (1885). However, Degas would endlessly experiment with unusual techniques. He would sometimes mix his pastel so heavily with liquid fixative that it became amalgamated into a sort of paste. He would do a drawing in charcoal and use layers of pastel to cover part of this. He would combine pastels and oil in a single work. He would even pass through a press a heavily pigmented charcoal drawing in order to transfer the excess of pigment onto a new sheet so as to make an inverse proof of the original. In his monotypes he used etching in a new way: he inked the unetched plate and drew with a brush in this layer of ink; then he removed all the ink in places to obtain strong contrasts of light and dark or painterly effects in this printing medium. Thus, in a variety of ways Degas succeeded in obtaining a richness of surface effects.

After 1866 Degas executed bronze statues of horses and dancers, up to three or four feet high, which complemented his interest in these subjects in his paintings. His bronze and painted wax figures of dancers, like the Little Dancer of Fourteen Years (1880-1881), are often clothed in real costumes, an innovation that gives them a remarkable immediacy. In the statues of dancers, Degas catches the figures in a transitory moment, as they are about to change position. As in the paintings, Degas strips the dancers of glamour and sometimes reveals them as scrawny adolescents. The surfaces of Degas's bronzes are not smooth but retain the rich articulations of the wax and thereby complement the expressive surfaces of the impressionist painting.

As he neared fifty, Degas began to withdraw, dreading old age. By 1885 his eyesight, never perfect, began to deteriorate. In spite of this, he traveled widely, creating a series of dreamlike pastel landscapes. He liked them so much that he exhibited the series at the Durand-Ruel gallery, the only one-man show of his work held in France during his lifetime. Between 1895 and 1898 he created his series of "Women Bathing" and several large-scale pastels. By 1904 his vision had deteriorated so severely that only sculpture and large compositions were possible.

If you enjoy the works of Edgar Degas

If you enjoy the works of Edgar Degas, you might want to check out the following:

The works of Edouard Manet, an Impressionist who painted scenes of everyday life in Paris.

The works of Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, whose paintings depict his experiences living among the Montmartre nightlife.

The works of Suzuki Harunobu, who introduced color to Japanese prints and frequently depicted graceful women.

The Louvre accepted Degas paintings for inclusion in the museum's collection in 1914. Degas died on September 27, 1917, and is buried in the family vault in Montmartre cemetery. He left behind, in addition to his own works, an enormous amount of art he had collected over the years, including works by Delacroix, Honore Daumier (1808-1879), Manet, Cezanne, Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Cassatt, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), and Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). It was one of the largest, most impressive collections ever amassed by an artist.