Edgar Degas (1834-1917), French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor. Degas was a prominent member of the Impressionist group, but he stood somewhat apart from the other members, partly because he was interested in drawing and did not share the Impressionists’ fascination with natural light and atmosphere and partly because he was primarily a figure painter and had no interest in landscape (the archetypal Impressionist subject). His innovative compositions, skilful draughtsmanship, and perceptive analysis of movement make him one of the masters of modern art of the late 19th century.

Degas was born in Paris on July 19, 1834, into a prosperous upper middle-class family (his father was a banker). The family name was originally spelt “De Gas” but Edgar seems to have thought this was pretentious and adopted the now familiar form in about 1860. After a good education, he started training to be a lawyer but he spent most of his time in the Louvre, and his father—impressed with his son’s obvious devotion to art—allowed him to abandon his legal studies. In 1855, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied only briefly, although he stayed long enough to benefit from the tuition of Louis Lamothe, whose admiration of Ingres long remained with Degas. He learnt more by copying Old Masters, both in the Louvre and in Italy, where he had relatives and where he spent a considerable amount of time between 1854 and 1859.

Degas’s early paintings consisted mainly of portraits and historical subjects, but from the early 1860s he turned to subject matter from the contemporary world. In this he was influenced by Édouard Manet, whom he met in 1862, and it was through Manet that he was introduced to the group of artists who were later called Impressionists. Both Degas and Manet came from a higher social class than the other Impressionists and to many people Degas seemed haughty and cold. However, he was greatly admired for his utter dedication to his work. He was attracted by theatrical subjects, and most of his works depict racecourses, theatres, cafés, music halls, or boudoirs; Gentlemen’s Race: Before the Start (1862, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) was his first painting on the theme of the racecourse. Degas was a keen observer of humanity—particularly of women, with whom his work is preoccupied—and in his portraits as well as in his studies of dancers, milliners, and laundresses, he cultivated a complete objectivity, attempting to catch his subjects in poses as natural and spontaneous as those recorded in action photographs.

Degas’s study of Japanese prints led him to experiment with unusual visual angles and asymmetrical compositions. His subjects often appear cropped at the edges, as in Ballet Rehearsal (1876, Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum) or Fin d’Arabesque (1877, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). In Woman with Chrysanthemums (1865, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), the female subject of the picture is pushed into a corner of the canvas by the large central bouquet of flowers.

Degas showed his work in seven of the eight group exhibitions of Impressionist works that were held between 1874 and 1886. His father had died in 1874, leaving enormous and completely unexpected debts, and after helping to pay these off, Degas was forced for the first time to try to make a living from his art (previously he had been reluctant to part with his work). He was the first of the Impressionists to receive general acclaim, partly because the clarity of his drawing made him seem less revolutionary than the other members of the group. In spite of the traditional aspects of his work, however, Degas was in certain ways just as audacious as the other Impressionists, notably in his use of unconventional viewpoints; although all his work was carefully pondered, his pictures sometimes convey the effect of vivid snapshots and he did indeed take photographs as an aid to his work.

Degas also experimented a good deal in technique. He tried various printmaking methods and in his paintings he sometimes used unusual combinations of media—for example pastel (or crayon) and tempera—in the same picture. In the 1880s his eyesight began to fail and from this time he used pastel more and more, as it was less physically demanding than oils. Curiously, it was in his pastels of the 1890s (for example, the Russian Dancers series), with their bold forms and free colour, that he came closest to mainstream Impressionism, although by this time the group had broken up. From the 1880s Degas also made sculptures in wax; working in this tactile medium, his poor eyesight was less of a handicap. His sculptures were cast in bronze after his death. Their subjects were of the same type that he had preferred in his paintings, including ballet dancers—most famously Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (1881, Tate Gallery, London)—women in the bath, and racehorses. After the turn of the century Degas was virtually blind (he lost his sight completely in one eye) and became a semi-recluse, but he was now revered as an artist. He died in Paris on September 27, 1917, aged 83.