Edgar Degas Prints

About Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas was born in Paris in July 1834 into a banking family and trained as a draughtsman in the classical tradition, entering the École des Beaux-Arts in 1855 under Louis Lamothe and spending three years in Italy from 1856 copying the old masters. He returned to Paris in 1859 and from 1870 turned to the subjects that define him: the ballet rehearsal room, the racecourse, the café and the laundry. He showed in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886 while insisting he was a realist, and he worked in the studio from drawings rather than outdoors. His dance pictures of the 1870s, including The Dance Class, catch dancers stretching, scratching and waiting rather than performing, framed with the cropped, off-centre viewpoints of photography and Japanese prints. Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, exhibited in 1881, was the only sculpture he showed in his lifetime. As his eyesight failed after 1890 he worked increasingly in pastel, in broad strokes of saturated colour. He died in Paris in September 1917. Degas's compositions are what make the pictures: a diagonal floor, an empty foreground, a figure cut by the frame. They read instantly on a wall.