Biography of Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas was French painter, draftsman, pastellist, sculptor, and photographer. He was best known for his paintings of dancers and horses.

Edgar Degas was born in the Rue Saint-Georges, Paris, on July 19, 1834, the eldest son of banker Auguste De Gas and his wife Celestine nee Musson.

From 1845 to 1853 Degas attended the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, a well thought school where he rapidly acquired a name for his skill at drawing. After he finished school, in 1853, Degas entered law school. Instead of studying law however, Degas went to the Louvre Museum and registered as a copyist.

Degas studied painting for several months in 1854 at Paris’s School of Fine Arts.
In 1855, Degas met the French painter Jean-August Dominique Ingres. Ingres believed drawing skills were important in painting. He told Degas to practice drawing, which Degas did for the rest of his life.

Edgar Degas

During 1856 – 1859, he traveled to Italy to draw, paint, and copy the Old Masters.  He was a founding member of the Impressionist group in 1874, and exhibited in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions during the next dozen years.

In 1872, Degas traveled to New Orleans to visit his American relatives. While visiting the family’s cotton plantation, he decided to paint The Cotton Exchange at New Orleans (1873).

Degas completed A Woman Ironing in 1873. At that time, working in a kitchen or laundry was considered menial work.

Many of the paintings, such as his horseracing series and his ballerina series, suggest a snapshot vision. One of his paintings, The Glass of Absinthe painted in 1876, shows a forlorn-looking couple sitting at a table in a brasserie, staring into space.

Degas briefly experimented with photography late in his career principally in the summer and fall of 1895. He died in Paris, September 27, 1917.
Biography of Edgar Degas