Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas

Hilaire Germain Edgar de Gas was born in Paris on 19th July 1834, the son of a wealthy banker and an American mother. He started painting seriously at a young age and developed his skill by copying works of art in the Louvre. His father expected him to study law, and he did so for a year but soon abandoned his studies to join the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. It was here that he met the renowned Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, who impressed upon him the importance of drawing. At the Ecole, he studied drawing under Louis Lamothe, who also placed emphasis on traditional academic art, especially draftsmanship. He travelled to Italy for 3 years to study the work of the Old Masters and although he focused for a time on history painting, his encounter with Manet and his art on his return to Paris turned his attention to genre painting, focusing more on contemporary themes. His painting career was interrupted in 1870 when he enlisted in the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian war. In 1874 he joined with a group of other young artists who wanted to organise an independent exhibition outside of the strict confines of the Salon. The group was quickly dubbed the 'Impressionists', after Monet's painting in the exhibit, Impression Sunrise. Despite this labelling, Degas' style and technique remained quite different from the other Impressionists and he never adopted the Impressionist name and avoided plein air painting. Historians have described him as somewhat of a 'reluctant modernist', caught between the new demands of revolutionary, socio-politically charged art and a conservative admiration for old masters. However, critics during his own lifetime were struck by his innovative techniques-his experimentation with peinture a l'essence and various other media and his penchant for asymmetrical cropping, odd segmentalisation and spatial tilting and distortion. Towards the end of his life Degas became blind and died in Paris in 1917.