DEGAS, Edgar (Paris, 1834 – Paris, 1917)
Hilaire-Germain-Edgar de Gas (a surname which he would later change for Degas) was educated at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand. In 1853 he started to study law. However, he shortly abandoned his studies and attended painting lessons with Louis Lamothe, a follower of Ingres, and assiduously visited the Musée du Louvre. In 1855 he registered at the École des Beaux-Arts and between 1856 and 1859 he travelled through Italy, spending most of he time in Rome, Naples and Florence. On his return to Paris, he executed history paintings, which he exhibited at the Salon, and his first scenes of horsemen.
In 1862, Degas met Édouard Manet and in 1865 he started attending the gatherings at the Café Guerbois together with other early Impressionist painters. At around that time, he abandoned historical themes to concentrate on subjects from daily life, particularly café concert and ballet scenes. Degas joined the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). He took part in the siege of Paris and the fighting there affected his sight. In 1872 he travelled with his brother René to New Orleans and the following year he visited his father, who was seriously ill, in Turin. When his father died, the family’s banking business collapsed, leaving Degas in a delicate financial situation.
In 1874 he participated in the first Impressionist exhibition. In spite of his critical attitude to Impressionism, particularly as regards the practice of plein air painting and the rejection of outlines, Degas exhibited again his oils and pastels of washerwomen, cafés concerts, and toilettes, as well as his first sculptures, alongside the Impressionists in 1876, 1877, 1879, 1880, 1881 and 1886. In 1878, the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Pau acquired one of his paintings, The Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873) for its collection, and years later, in 1894, several of his works became part of the Musée du Luxembourg’s collection, thanks to the Caillebotte legacy. His first individual exhibition took place at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1893. In 1898, the violent anti-Semitism which he displayed during the Dreyfus Affair put an end to his long friendship with the writer Ludovic-Halévy and affected many of his personal relationships.
As a result of serious problems with his eyesight, Degas restricted his late artistic activity to the creation of large format pastels with thick textures and to sculptures with an accentuated sense of movement. Degas was not only a painter and sculptor, but also a compulsive collector, having gathered since the 1880s some 5,000 works by great past masters and by his contemporaries such as Ingres, Delacroix, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Manet and Gauguin. He died in Paris on 27 September 1917, at the age of 83.
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