Edgar Degas
“After a great many essays and experiments and trial shoots in all directions, he has fallen in love with modern life, and out of all the subjects of modern life he has chosen washerwomen and ballet dancers. . . . It is a world of pink and white, of female flesh in lawn and gauze, the most delightful of pretexts for using pale, soft tints.”
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Edmond de Goncourt, artist, critic, and writer, 1874
The dance class
(La classe de danse)
1873-1876. Oil on canvas.
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The son of a Neapolitan banker, Auguste de Gas and a Creole girl, Celestine, Edgar Degas was born on July 19th, 1834 in Paris, France. He came from a social-climbing middle class family that took to spelling their name as de Gas, "a preposition suggesting a land-owning aristocratic background which they did not actually have."(Edgar Degas Biography) As an adult, Degas would later revert back to the original spelling.
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Degas attended the Lycee Louis-Le-Grand on the rue Saint-Jacques. He had been a talented painter and artist from childhood, always having exhibited a remarkable skill for the trade. This talent was encouraged by his father, and at the age of 18, Degas "received permission to copy at the Louvre in Paris." (Edgar Degas Biography)
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Originally having pursued law, Degas soon left school and entered the Louvre at age nineteen. Later, in 1855, Degas was admitted to into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. By the 1870s, Degas had developed a knack for painting the modern woman of the time: Milliners, laundresses, and ballet dancers. His paintings of ballerinas are some of his most well-known works to date. For a man with a strong distaste for women, this is quite the feat.
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Ballet Rehearsal
1873-1878. Oil on canvas.
Degas' legacy as one of the greatest impressionist painters has never gone unrecognized. However, "the misogynist overtones present in his sexualized portraits of women, as well as his intense anti-Semitism, have served to alienate Degas from some modern critics."(Edgar Degas Biography) Degas was known to paint women in the worst light, even at time goes so far as to purposefully paint or sculpt them uglier than they actually were (such as with Marie Van Goethem). "When, in 1866, Manet saw the unbecoming portrait that Degas had painted of his wife, he was so furious that he cut out the offending section of the canvas. Degas had no interest in the clichés of feminine beauty." (Laurens)
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In the 1890s at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish captain in the French military was convicted of treason "on spying charges," Degas was vocally against the Captain, despite his innocence. His anti-Semitic opinions took a huge toll on his reputation in art circles around Paris. Degas anti-Semitic views, misogyny and lack of sensitivity toward poor (even so much as deeming them 'the race of the street') makes him a much less likable character by modern standards.
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Source(s):
Edgar Degas Biography. Biography, 2 April 2014, https://www.biography.com/artist/edgar-degas. Date Accessed: 11 May 2021.
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Laurens, Camille. Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. Les Fugitives, 2017.
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Further Reading
Here are some articles and books on this topic!