Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas was born in 1834 into a wealthy Parisian banking family with deep ties to Naples, and his privileged upbringing afforded him the luxury of pursuing art without financial pressure. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Louis Lamothe, a pupil of Ingres, and this classical training instilled a lifelong devotion to drawing that set him apart from many of his Impressionist contemporaries. Early trips to Italy between 1856 and 1859 deepened his reverence for Renaissance masters, and his initial ambitions lay in history painting. Yet by the mid-1860s, influenced by Manet and the realist imperative to paint modern life, Degas turned his attention to the racetrack, the cafe, the laundress, and above all, the ballet — subjects he would explore obsessively for the next five decades.
Degas exhibited in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886, making him a central figure in the movement, though he bristled at the label and preferred to call himself a “Realist” or “Independent.” Unlike Monet or Renoir, he had little interest in plein-air landscape painting or the dissolution of form in sunlight; his concerns were compositional daring, the captured gesture, and the truthful rendering of movement. Works like “The Ballet Class” (1874) and “The Star” (1878) presented dancers from unexpected angles — viewed from the wings, cut off by the picture’s edge, caught mid-stretch in rehearsal — reflecting the influence of Japanese woodblock prints and the compositional accidents of photography. His friendship with photographer Eadweard Muybridge and his own experiments with the camera in the 1890s reinforced his fascination with sequential motion and unconventional framing, giving his images a snapshot-like immediacy that was revolutionary for its time.
As Degas aged, his failing eyesight — likely caused by a retinal condition exacerbated during his service in the Franco-Prussian War — pushed him increasingly toward pastel and sculpture, media that relied on touch and bold color rather than fine linear detail. His pastels of bathers and dancers from the 1880s and 1890s are among his most luminous and expressive works, layering strokes of vivid chalk to build surfaces that shimmer with energy. “The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer” (1881), a wax sculpture dressed in a real tutu and hair ribbon, scandalized critics who found its realism unsettlingly lifelike, yet it is now recognized as one of the most original sculptures of the nineteenth century. Degas grew reclusive and cantankerous in his final years, his anti-Dreyfusard views straining friendships, and he essentially stopped working after 1912. He died in 1917, leaving behind a body of some 1,500 paintings, hundreds of pastels, prints, and over 150 wax sculptures discovered in his studio — a vast legacy that proved one could be both a rigorous classicist and a radical innovator.