Edgar Degas - 138 High Resolution Images

Edgar Degas (born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, 1834-1917) was a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings, especially those of dancers. In addition, Degas painted racehorses and jockeys, as well as portraits. 

Although Degas is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, he rejected the term, preferring to be called a realist, and did not paint outdoors as many Impressionists did.

Degas (he adopted this less grandiose spelling when he became an adult) began his schooling at age eleven.  His mother died when he was thirteen, after that his main influences were his father and several unmarried uncles. Degas began to paint early in life. By the time he graduated with a baccalaureate in literature in 1853, at age 18, he had turned a room in his home into an artist's studio. Upon graduating, he registered as a copyist at the Louvre, but his father expected him to go to law school. Degas duly enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris in November 1853 but applied little effort to his studies.

In 1855, he met Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whom he revered.  In April of that year, Degas was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts.  He studied drawing there and flourished, following the style of Ingres.

Degas exhibited a history painting for his first submission to the Salon in 1865, although it attracted little attention.  His 'Scene from the Steeplechase, The Fallen Jockey' (Salon of 1866) signalled his growing commitment to contemporary subject matter. The change in his art was influenced primarily by Édouard Manet, whom Degas had met in 1864 (while both were copying the same Velázquez portrait in the Louvre).

Degas enlisted in the National Guard upon the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. During rifle training his eyesight was found to be defective, and for the rest of his life his eye problems were a constant worry to him.

Degas returned to Paris in 1873 and his father died the following year, when Degas learned that his brother René had amassed enormous business debts. To preserve his family's reputation, Degas sold his house and an art collection he had inherited and used the money to pay off his brother's debts. Dependent for the first time in his life on sales of his artwork for income, he produced much of his greatest work during the decade beginning in 1874. Disenchanted by now with the Salon, he instead joined a group of young artists who were organising an independent exhibiting society. The group soon became known as the Impressionists.

After 1890, Degas's eyesight, which had long troubled him, deteriorated further. He never married, and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, restlessly wandering the streets of Paris before dying in September 1917.