Edgar Degas

1834-1917

Edgar Degas was born in Paris in 1834 to a prosperous banking family. After rigorous training at the École des Beaux-Arts under Louis Lamothe, he spent three years in Italy copying Renaissance masters before returning to paint contemporary Paris. Though he exhibited with the Impressionists from 1874 onwards, Degas rejected the label, insisting his art derived from classical training and deliberate study rather than spontaneity. He became the painter of modern urban life: racehorses and their riders, laundresses, milliners, and especially dancers backstage and in rehearsal. His superb draftsmanship and mastery of movement—captured through pastel, oil, sculpture, and innovative photographic experiments—defined dancers not as ethereal but as working professionals. His psychological portraits and off-center compositions, influenced by Japanese prints, distinguished him from the plein-air Impressionists he mocked. Eye trouble from his service in the Franco-Prussian War and later financial hardship drove much of his prolific output. He died in Paris in 1917, nearly blind.