Edgar Degas

The Life

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas was born on July 19, 1834, in Paris, the eldest of five children in a moderately wealthy banking family. His father, Auguste De Gas, ran the Paris branch of a family bank; his mother, Célestine Musson, was a Creole from New Orleans who died when Edgar was thirteen, a loss that marked him deeply. Educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, he earned his baccalauréat in 1853 and briefly enrolled in law at the University of Paris before abandoning it for art, registering as a copyist at the Louvre. In 1855 he met the aging Neoclassical master Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who reportedly told him, "Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist" — advice that shaped Degas's lifelong reverence for draughtsmanship. That same year he entered the École des Beaux-Arts, studying under Louis Lamothe, a follower of Ingres. Between 1856 and 1859, Degas traveled through Italy, copying Renaissance masters in Florence, Rome, and Naples, and beginning studies for his first ambitious group portrait, The Bellelli Family, depicting his aunt's household in Naples. Back in Paris, he debuted at the Salon in 1865 with a history painting, Scene of War in the Middle Ages, but his true turn came around 1866–1868 as he shifted toward contemporary Parisian life — racecourses, theaters, and eventually the ballet rehearsal rooms of the Paris Opéra that would define his career. He met Édouard Manet at the Louvre around 1864, and through Manet's circle became linked with the emerging group of independent painters, though he resisted the label "Impressionist," preferring "Realist" or "Independent." He helped organize and exhibited in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, skipping only one. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 revealed Degas had defective eyesight during rifle training in the National Guard, foreshadowing the vision problems that would plague him for the rest of his life. In 1872–73 he traveled to New Orleans to visit his mother's family, producing A Cotton Office in New Orleans, the only painting purchased by a museum (Pau, France) during his lifetime. His father's death in 1874 exposed enormous business debts left by his brother René; Degas sold the family house and inherited art collection to cover them, and for the first time in his life became financially dependent on selling his own work, which pushed him toward the dealer market and, eventually, wealthy American collectors. A close, decades-long friendship developed with the American painter Mary Cassatt, whom he invited to exhibit with the Impressionists in 1877; she encouraged his experiments with pastel and printmaking, and helped introduce his work to American collectors, though the two later quarreled over the Dreyfus Affair, during which Degas's antisemitism led him to break with longtime Jewish friends and colleagues. From the late 1870s Degas increasingly worked in pastel, monotype, and sculpture in wax, exploring dancers, bathers, milliners, and laundresses with unflinching honesty. He never married, remarking that an artist must live alone. As his eyesight deteriorated sharply after 1890, he turned to sculpture he could feel with his hands, modeling roughly 150 wax figures — including the celebrated Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, shown publicly only once, in 1881 — that were cast in bronze posthumously by the Hébrard foundry beginning in 1919. Nearly blind and increasingly isolated in his final years, he was forced from his longtime studio on the rue Victor-Massé in 1912 when the building was slated for demolition. Edgar Degas died in Paris on September 27, 1917, at the age of 83.

The Hand

Degas prized draughtsmanship above all — a debt to Ingres — yet he used it to serve a radically modern eye trained on movement, artifice, and the awkward, unposed instant. Unlike his Impressionist peers, he almost never painted en plein air; he worked indoors from memory, sketches, photographs, and studio models, insisting his art was the product of "reflection and study of the great masters," not spontaneous sensation. His signature device was the off-kilter, cropped composition — dancers sliced by the canvas edge, figures viewed from an elevated box or through a doorway — a strategy indebted to Japanese ukiyo-e prints and to the snapshot aesthetics of contemporary photography, which he also practiced. From the mid-1870s he became one of history's great pastellists, exploiting the medium's density of color and immediacy of touch, often layering it over monotype impressions — a technique he pursued across two intense phases (roughly 1876–1880 and again in the early 1890s), producing some 300 monotypes, many later reworked with pastel to heighten color and texture. He also returned periodically to etching and lithography. In sculpture, developed privately and never intended for sale, he modeled dancers and bathers in wax and clay, experimenting with anatomy and balance in three dimensions; only Little Dancer of Fourteen Years — dressed in a real bodice, tutu, and satin ballet slippers with human hair — was exhibited during his lifetime, at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, where it startled critics with its unidealized, almost anthropological realism. As his eyesight worsened from the 1890s onward, his palette grew bolder and his forms simpler and more abstracted, with hatched, vibrating strokes of pastel replacing fine outline. Across all media his obsessive subject was the human body in motion or unguarded repose — dancers stretching at the barre, women bathing or toweling off in private interiors, laundresses stifling yawns — rendered with a clinical, sometimes unsentimental scrutiny that set him apart from the softer sensibilities of Monet or Renoir. He worked and reworked the same poses obsessively across decades, treating each subject less as a single image than as a problem to be solved from every angle.

The Legacy

Degas is remembered today as one of Impressionism's founding exhibitors even though his rigorous, studio-based, drawing-first method sat apart from the movement's plein-air landscape painters. His unconventional cropping, elevated and oblique viewpoints, and fascination with artificial light and modern spectacle — the ballet, the racetrack, the café-concert — anticipated both photography's compositional logic and twentieth-century modernism's interest in fragmentary, unposed vision. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who admired him intensely, absorbed his cropped, theatrical compositions and unsparing eye for Parisian nightlife; Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group in Britain carried his influence into English painting; and his close friend Mary Cassatt credited him with pushing her toward pastel, printmaking, and a franker, more structural approach to the figure. Degas's posthumous discovery of some 150 wax and clay sculptures — unseen during his lifetime and cast in bronze by the Hébrard foundry from 1919 onward — transformed his reputation from painter of dancers into a pioneering sculptor whose informal, exploratory modeling anticipated Rodin and Matisse's own sculptural experiments. Little Dancer of Fourteen Years in particular is now considered a landmark of modern sculpture, its mixed-media realism (fabric tutu, human hair, wax skin tones) a radical gesture in 1881 that scandalized and fascinated critics in equal measure. Major museums have built entire study programs around his working process: the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York hold the deepest institutional collections of his work, and joint retrospectives — including the widely reviewed Degas/Cassatt at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (2014) and the sweeping Manet/Degas exhibition staged jointly by the Musée d'Orsay and the Met (2023–2024) — continue to reassess his relationships to contemporaries and his singular place between Realism, Impressionism, and early modernism. Scholars increasingly emphasize the darker threads of his biography, including his antisemitism during the Dreyfus Affair, alongside his artistic achievement, producing a more complicated, fuller picture of the man. His name endures in art history as shorthand for the modern painter of movement — the dancer suspended mid-turn, the jockey leaning into a curve — captured not as posed allegory but as fugitive, observed life.

The Market

Degas's auction market is anchored by his sculpture as much as his paintings and pastels. The current auction record belongs to a bronze cast of Petite danseuse de quatorze ans (Little Dancer of Fourteen Years), which sold for $41.6 million at Christie's New York on May 12, 2022, surpassing the previous record held by the pastel Danseuse au repos, which fetched $37.04 million at Sotheby's New York on November 3, 2008. Other major results include Danseuses à la barre, which sold for $26.57 million at Christie's London in 2008, and an earlier cast of Danseuse au repos, which brought $25.33 million at Sotheby's London in 1999 — underscoring how consistently his ballet subjects, in both paint and bronze, have commanded the top end of Impressionist sales. Because Degas never authorized bronze casts of his waxes during his lifetime — the Hébrard foundry produced editions only after his 1917 death, working from roughly 150 recovered models — his sculptural market involves a defined universe of lifetime-modeled, posthumously cast bronzes that auction houses treat as a distinct and highly sought category, separate from a controversial batch of later, disputed surmoulage casts produced from the 2000s onward that scholars have treated with skepticism. Collectors and specialists generally price and authenticate Degas bronzes according to Hébrard foundry marks and edition numbers, making provenance research essential to any market assessment. Beyond the salesroom, Degas's institutional standing is unassailable: the Musée d'Orsay and the Metropolitan Museum of Art hold the two most significant public collections of his work, and his pieces anchor the Impressionist and Modern departments of virtually every major encyclopedic museum in the world. Historic sale records — Les deux danseuses selling for a mere $36,800 in 1927 — trace the near-exponential rise in valuation of his work across the twentieth century, reflecting his consolidation as one of the most historically significant and commercially resilient painter-sculptors of the modern era.