Edgar Degas

“People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.” -- Edgar Degas

Generally recognized as a master of drawing the human figure in motion, Edgar Degas (1834–1917) is especially identified with the subject of the dance. Degas’ ballerinas remain among the most popular images in 19th-century art. 

 There are many great paintings to remind us that the artists of the Impressionist age were sensitively aware of contemporary life. Degas’s choice of subject matter reflects his modern approach. He favored scenes of ballet dancers, laundresses, milliners , and denizens of Parisian low life.

His interest in ballet dancers intensified in the 1870s, and eventually he produced approximately Over half Degas’ works – approximately 1,500 paintings, drawings, prints, and the only sculpture exhibited during his lifetime – depict dancers. These are not traditional portraits, but studies that address the movement of the human body, exploring the physicality and discipline of the dancers through the use of contorted postures and unexpected vantage points.  Many of his portrayals of dancers are not during a performance, but behind the scenes images

Degas experimented with an array of techniques, breaking up surface textures with hatching, contrasting dry pastel with wet, and using gouache and watercolors to soften the contours of his figures.

By the late 1880s, Degas’s eyesight had begun to fail, perhaps as a result of an injury suffered during his service in defending Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. After that time he focused almost exclusively on dancers and nudes, increasingly turning to sculpture as his eyesight weakened. In his later years, he was concerned chiefly with showing women bathing, entirely without self-consciousness and emphatically not posed.

Degas continued working as late as 1912, when he was forced to leave the studio in Montmartre in which he had labored for more than twenty years. He died five years later in 1917, at the age of eighty-three.