Edgar Degas

Born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas on 19 July 1834 in Paris, Edgar Degas came from an affluent banking family with aristocratic roots and spent his childhood among the cultivated circles of the French capital. After his mother's death in 1847, his father and grandfather shaped his upbringing, yet Degas abandoned legal studies in 1853 to pursue art. He entered the École des Beaux-Arts, studied drawing under Louis Lamothe, and traveled repeatedly to Italy between 1854 and 1859, where he copied Renaissance masters and painted portraits of his relatives.

In 1855 he met Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose advice to draw many lines became a lifelong creed. Early in his career Degas aspired to history painting, producing works such as Young Spartans Exercising around 1860, an oil on canvas now at the National Gallery in London that depicts Spartan youths in athletic contest and which he repeatedly reworked until his death. After meeting Édouard Manet in 1864, Degas shifted toward contemporary subjects, bringing the compositional discipline of a history painter to scenes of modern Parisian life.

He painted Count Lepic and His Daughters around 1871, a portrait of his friend the Vicomte Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic with his children Eylau and Jeanine, now held by the Foundation E.G. Bührle in Zürich. Though regarded as a founder of Impressionism, Degas rejected the label, preferring to call himself a realist, and unlike his peers he worked almost entirely indoors, from memory, photographs, or live models. More than half his output depicts dancers, and The Ballet Class, painted between about 1873 and 1876 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, shows the fatigue and discipline of the Opéra rehearsal room under Jules Perrot's gaze.

In the 1880s Degas turned increasingly to pastel, creating intimate nudes such as After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself, held at the National Gallery, in which a model bends forward to rub her neck with a towel in an unguarded, keyhole-like moment. He also experimented with photography, monotype, and sculpture, producing the celebrated wax Little Dancer, Fourteen Year Old in 1881. Failing eyesight plagued him from the Franco-Prussian War onward, forcing him to give up painting around 1910; he turned to sculpture in his final years. He died in Paris on 27 September 1917 and is buried at the Cimetière de Montmartre.