Edgar Degas facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Edgar Degas
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Self-portrait (Degas au porte-fusain), 1855
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| Born |
Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas
19 July 1834 |
| Died | 27 September 1917 (aged 83) |
| Nationality | French |
| Known for | Painting, sculpture, drawing |
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Notable work
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The Bellelli Family (1858–1867) Woman with Chrysanthemums (1865) Chanteuse de Café (c. 1878) At the Milliner's (1882) |
| Movement | Impressionism |
| Signature | |
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Edgar Degas (19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917) was a French artist. He is famous for his paintings: he was one of those who started Impressionism, although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist. Degas also produced bronze sculptures, prints, and drawings.
He is identified with the subject of the dance, and over half of his works depict dancers. These display his mastery in the depiction of movement. His portraits are notable for their psychological complexity and the way they show human isolation.
Early life
Degas was born in Paris, France, into a moderately wealthy family. He was the oldest of five children of Célestine Musson De Gas, a Creole from New Orleans, Louisiana, and Augustin De Gas, a banker. His maternal grandfather Germain Musson, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, of French descent, and had settled in New Orleans in 1810.
Degas (he adopted this less grandiose spelling of his family name when he became an adult) began his schooling at age eleven, enrolling in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. His mother died when he was thirteen, and the main influences on him for the remainder of his youth were his father and several unmarried uncles.
Degas began to paint early in life. By the time he graduated from the Lycée with a baccalauréat in literature in 1853, at age 18, he had turned a room in his home into an artist's studio. Upon graduating, he registered as a copyist in the Louvre Museum, but his father expected him to go to law school. Degas duly enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris in November 1853 but applied little effort to his studies.
In 1855, he met Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whom he revered and whose advice he never forgot: "Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist." In April of that year Degas was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts. He studied drawing there with Louis Lamothe, under whose guidance he flourished, following the style of Ingres.
In July 1856, Degas traveled to Italy, where he would remain for the next three years. In 1858, while staying with his aunt's family in Naples, he studied famous painters like Michelangelo and Raphael and learnt by copying their work.
Career
In 1859 he came back to Paris. He started his first important painting The Bellelli Family, and also started on a few paintings on historical myths, like Alexander and Bucephalus and The Daughter of Jephthah. In 1861 he visited Normandy and made his first drawings of horses which were an important subject for his paintings.
After the start of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Degas worked for the National Guard. He did not have time to paint. After the war he went to stay with his brother Rene in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1873 he went back to Paris and in 1874 his father died. He then found out his brother had large business debts. Edgar had to sell the house and a collection of art he had inherited. He now had to depend on his paintings for his income. He created a lot of great paintings in next 10 years. With the money he earned, he bought paintings by painters he liked a lot. Examples are Manet, Paul Cézanne, Pissarro, Gauguin, Van Gogh and others.
In 1874 Edgar Degas and a group of other painters started to organise their own art exhibition. Their exhibitions were called "Impressionist Exhibitions". At the end of the 1880s, he started to take photographs of his friends. Other photographs of dancers were used as an example for some of his later paintings.
Degas's only showing of sculpture during his life took place in 1881 when he exhibited The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years. A nearly life-size wax figure with real hair and dressed in a cloth tutu, it provoked a strong reaction from critics, most of whom found its realism extraordinary but denounced the dancer as ugly.
Degas created a substantial number of other sculptures during a span of four decades, but they remained unseen by the public until a posthumous exhibition in 1918.
As the years passed, Degas became isolated. He probably stopped working in 1912. He never married, and he was nearly blind at the end of his life. He died in Paris in 1917. Degas left more than 2,000 oil paintings and pastels and 150 sculptures.
Degas's paintings, pastels, drawings, and sculptures are on prominent display in many museums, and have been the subject of many museum exhibitions and retrospectives.
Relationship with Mary Cassatt
In 1877, Degas invited Mary Cassatt to exhibit in the third Impressionist exhibition. He had admired a portrait (Ida) she exhibited in the Salon of 1874, and the two formed a friendship. They had much in common: they shared similar tastes in art and literature, came from affluent backgrounds, had studied painting in Italy, and both were independent, never marrying.
Cassatt frequently posed for Degas, notably for his millinery series trying on hats. Cassatt and Degas worked most closely together in the fall and winter of 1879–80 when Cassatt was mastering her printmaking technique. Degas owned a small printing press, and by day she worked at his studio using his tools and press. However, in April 1880, Degas abruptly withdrew from the prints journal they had been collaborating on, and without his support the project folded. Although they continued to visit each other until Degas' death in 1917, she never again worked with him as closely as she had over the prints journal.
Images for kids
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Edgar Degas c. 1855–1860
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A Cotton Office in New Orleans, 1873
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The Dance Class (La Classe de Danse), 1873–1876, oil on canvas
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L'Absinthe, 1876, oil on canvas
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Place de la Concorde, 1875, oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
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Musicians in the Orchestra, 1872, oil on canvas
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At the Races, 1877–1880, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
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Dancers, 1900, Princeton University Art Museum
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Little Dancer of Fourteen Years Cast posthumously in 1922 from a mixed-media sculpture modeled c. 1879–1880 Bronze Partly tinted, with cotton skirt and satin hair ribbon, on a wooden base Metropolitan Museum of Art New York City
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See also
In Spanish: Edgar Degas para niños
