The Artist Edgar Degas

ALL ARTISTS

DEGAS, Edgar, French painter, engraver, and sculptor born Paris, France, July 19, 1834; died there, Sept. 27, 1917. Like Edouard Manet, he belonged to a wealthy bourgeois family, which, moreover, made some claim to aristocratic lineage, for his father called himself De Gas, a spelling that the artist himself used until 1870 or thereabouts. After apathetically reading law, Degas decided to become a painter. It is said that he chanced to do the great Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres a service, receiving thereupon this solemn injunction: "Draw lines, young man, many lines; from memory or from nature, it is in this way that you will become a good artist." This advice accorded with his native bent, and in 1855, at the Ecole des BeauxArts, he was fortunate enough to study with Louis Lamothe, an Ingres pupil. Years later, when his palette had acquired its own peculiar incandescence, he could say with justice: "I am a colorist with line."

The story of Degas' life is the story of his art. Several trips to Italy (in part to see relatives) and Spain, a gunner's role during the Commune, a visit to New Orleans in 1872, and a handful of friendships, notably with Manet and Giovanni Boldini, the witty portraitist: these are the exceptional incidents in this lay monk's shaping of his vision. It was the journalist Louis Emile Edmond Duranty who persuaded Degas to align himself with the impressionists, and from 1874 through 1886 he exhibited with them. But his impressionism was incidental: he was basically a romantic fascinated by characteristic or occupational gesture. His studies remind us of the candid camera, without its bravura slickness, and he is said literally to have spied upon his models, sometimes to the point of observing his far from glamorous ballet girls and careworn laundresses through a keyhole. A master of linear precision, he became one of the most subtle draftsmen of all time. His bold foreshortening owes a good deal to Japanese prints, nor can the influence of Paul Gauguin be ruled out.

During his last 30 years Degas lived like a hermit, seeing only a very few friends and adding to his wonderful collection of pictures (which included 20 by Ingres and 13 by Eugene Delacroix). His caustic wit grew, and people tended to avoid the eccentric old man. As his sight failed, he worked feverishly at new techniques; finally, he again modeled wax figures.

When the end came, during the critical days of World War I, the newspapers could spare little space for him. However, he was far from neglected, and as early as the 1890's his work began to be much sought after, though his great reputation did not come until later. As brilliant in pastel as in oils, he was a painter's painter: someone to be studied.

Today his work is represented in major museums throughout the world. While it has been called a psychological commentary on his era, it sums it up, rather, in its essential gestures (to paraphrase Degas himself).