Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas Biography
Edgar Degas (19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917), born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. Edgar Degas is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although Edgar Degas rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist. A superb draughtsman, Edgar Degas is especially identified with the subject of the dance, and over half his works depict dancers. These display his mastery in the depiction of movement, as do his racecourse subjects and female nudes. His portraits are considered to be among the finest in the history of art.
Early in his career, his ambition was to be a history painter, and for this his academic training and close study of classic art had superbly prepared him. Upon abandoning this project, Edgar Degas brought the traditional methods of a history painter to bear on contemporary subject matter, and became a classical painter of modern life.
Edgar Degas - Early life
Degas was born in Paris, France, the eldest of five children of Célestine Musson De Gas and Augustin De Gas, a banker. The family was moderately wealthy. At age eleven, Degas (as a young man Edgar Degas abandoned the more pretentious spelling of the family name) began his schooling with enrollment in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, graduating in 1853 with a baccalauréat in literature.
Edgar Degas - beginnings of the painter
Degas began to paint seriously early in life. By eighteen Edgar Degas had turned a room in his home into an artist's studio, and had begun making copies in the Louvre, but his father expected him to go to law school. Degas duly registered at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris in November 1853, but made little effort at his studies there. In 1855, Degas met Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, whom Edgar Degas revered, and was advised by him to "draw lines, young man, many lines." In April of that same year, Degas received admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where Edgar Degas studied drawing with Louis Lamothe, under whose guidance Edgar Degas flourished, following the style of Ingres. In July 1856, Degas traveled to Italy, where Edgar Degas would remain for the next three years. There Edgar Degas drew and painted copies after Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and other artists of the Renaissance, often selecting from an altarpiece an individual head which Edgar Degas treated as a portrait. It was during this period that Degas studied and became accomplished in the techniques of high, academic, and classical art.
Edgar Degas - Artistic career
After returning from Italy in 1859, Degas continued his education by copying paintings at the Louvre; Edgar Degas was to remain an enthusiastic copyist well into middle age. In the early 1860s, while visiting his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon in Normandy, Edgar Degas made his first studies of horses. Edgar Degas exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1865, when the jury accepted his painting Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which attracted little attention. Although Edgar Degas exhibited annually in the Salon during the next five years, Edgar Degas submitted no more history paintings, and his Steeplechase—The Fallen Jockey (Salon of 1866) signaled his growing commitment to contemporary subject matter. The change in his art was influenced primarily by the example of Edouard Manet, whom Degas had met in 1864 while copying in the Louvre.
At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Degas enlisted in the National Guard, where his defense of Paris left him little time for painting. During rifle training his eyesight was found to be defective, and for the rest of his life his eye problems were a constant worry to him.
Edgar Degas in New Orleans
After the war, in 1872, Degas began an extended stay in New Orleans, Louisiana, where his brother René and a number of other relatives lived. Staying in a house on Esplanade Avenue, Degas produced a number of works, many depicting family members. One of Degas' New Orleans works, depicting a scene at The Cotton Exchange at New Orleans, garnered favourable attention back in France, and was his only work purchased by a museum (that of Pau) during his lifetime.
Edgar Degas in Paris
Degas returned to Paris in 1873. By now thoroughly disenchanted with the Salon, in 1874 Degas joined forces with a group of young artists who were intent upon organizing an independent exhibiting society. The result was the first of the exhibitions that became labeled Impressionist Exhibitions. The Impressionists subsequently held seven additional shows, the last in 1886. Degas showed his work in all but one, even though he was, in the words of art historian Andrew Forge, "continually at odds with the landscape painters. Edgar Degas deplored the scandal that surrounded the exhibitions and the publicity and advertisement that his colleagues quite naturally looked for. Edgar Degas objected violently to the label Impressionist that the press had hung on them."
At about the same time, Degas also began a hobby as a photographer, using it for pleasure, and to accurately capture action for his paintings and artwork.
Death of the father of Edgar Degas
At the death of his father in 1874, the subsequent settling of the estate revealed that René had amassed enormous business debts. To preserve the family name, Degas was forced to sell his house and a collection of art Edgar Degas had inherited. Edgar Degas now found himself suddenly dependent on sales of his artwork for income.
After several years, his financial situation improved and sales of his own work permitted him to indulge his passion for collecting works by artists he admired—old masters such as El Greco, moderns such as Delacroix, and his contemporaries Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Ingres and Manet were especially well represented in his collection.
Edgar Degas isolated and lonely
As the years passed, Degas became isolated, due in part to his belief "that a painter could have no personal life." The Dreyfus Affair controversy brought his antisemitic leanings to the fore and Edgar Degas broke with all his Jewish friends. In later life, Degas regretted the loss of those friends.
The End of Edgar Degas... and the beginning of fame
While Edgar Degas is known to have been working in pastel as late as the end of 1907, and is believed to have continued making sculpture as late as 1910, Edgar Degas apparently ceased working in 1912, when the impending demolition of his longtime residence on the rue Victor Massé forced a wrenching move to quarters on the boulevard de Clichy. Edgar Degas never married and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, restlessly wandering the streets of Paris before dying in 1917. Degas's last years were sad and lonely ones, especially as Edgar Degas outlived many of his closest friends.
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