Edgar Degas |
Today, The Grandma has invested in a new project buying a new Edgar Degas' painting for her collection.
She has studied all the possibilities about the picture to obtain and she has been reading more information about Degas to try to understand him and his passion for art.
She has studied all the possibilities about the picture to obtain and she has been reading more information about Degas to try to understand him and his passion for art.
Edgar Degas (19 July 1834–27 September 1917) was a French artist famous for his paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings. He is especially identified with the subject of dance; more than half of his works depict dancers. Regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, he rejected the term, preferring to be called a realist.
He was a superb draftsman, and particularly masterly in depicting movement, as can be seen in his rendition of dancers, racecourse subjects and female nudes. His portraits are notable for their psychological complexity and for their portrayal of human isolation.
More information: Edgar Degas
At the beginning of his career, Degas wanted to be a history painter, a calling for which he was well prepared by his rigorous academic training and close study of classical art. In his early thirties, he changed course, and by bringing the traditional methods of a history painter to bear on contemporary subject matter, he became a classical painter of modern life.
Degas was born in Paris,
France, into a moderately wealthy family. He was the oldest of five
children of Célestine Musson De Gas, a Creole from New Orleans,
Louisiana, and Augustin De Gas, a banker. His maternal grandfather
Germain Musson, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti of French descent and
had settled in New Orleans in 1810.
Edgar Degas |
Degas, he adopted this less grandiose spelling of his family name when he became an adult, began his schooling at age eleven, enrolling in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. His mother died when he was thirteen, and the main influences on him for the remainder of his youth were his father and several unmarried uncles.
Degas began to paint early in life. By the time he graduated from the Lycée with a baccalauréat 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 in The Louvre Museum, 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 Degas revered and whose advice he never forgot: Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist.
In April of that year
Degas was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts. He studied drawing there
with Louis Lamothe, under whose guidance he flourished, following the
style of Ingres. In July 1856, Degas traveled to Italy, where he would
remain for the next three years.
More information: The Art Story
In 1858, while staying with his aunt's family in Naples, he made the first studies for his early masterpiece The Bellelli Family. He also drew and painted numerous copies of works by Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and other Renaissance artists, but -contrary to conventional practice- he usually selected from an altarpiece a detail that had caught his attention: a secondary figure, or a head which he treated as a portrait.
Upon his return to
France in 1859, Degas moved into a Paris studio large enough to permit
him to begin painting The Bellelli Family -an imposing canvas he
intended for exhibition in the Salon, although it remained unfinished
until 1867. He also began work on several history paintings: Alexander
and Bucephalus and The Daughter of Jephthah in 1859–60; Sémiramis
Building Babylon in 1860; and Young Spartans around 1860.
Edgar Degas |
In 1861 Degas visited his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon in Normandy, and made the earliest of his many studies of horses. He exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1865, when the jury accepted his painting Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which attracted little attention. Although he exhibited annually in the Salon during the next five years, he submitted no more history paintings, and his Steeplechase -The Fallen Jockey (Salon of 1866) signaled his growing commitment to contemporary subject matter.
The change in his art was influenced primarily by the example of Édouard Manet, whom Degas had met in 1864, while both were copying the same Velázquez portrait in the Louvre, according to a story that may be apocryphal.
Upon the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Degas enlisted in the National Guard, where his defense of Paris left him little time for painting. 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.
After the war, Degas
began in 1872 an extended stay in New Orleans, Louisiana, where his
brother René and a number of other relatives lived. Staying at the home
of his Creole uncle, Michel Musson, on Esplanade Avenue, Degas produced a
number of works, many depicting family members. One of Degas's New
Orleans works, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, garnered favorable
attention back in France, and was his only work purchased by a museum, the Pau, during his lifetime.
Degas returned to Paris
in 1873 and his father died the following year, whereupon 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.
More information: Daily Art Magazine
Disenchanted by now with the Salon, he instead joined a group of young artists who were organizing an independent exhibiting society. The group soon became known as the Impressionists.
Between 1874 and 1886 they mounted eight art shows, known as the Impressionist Exhibitions. Degas took a leading role in organizing the exhibitions, and showed his work in all but one of them, despite his persistent conflicts with others in the group. He had little in common with Monet and the other landscape painters in the group, whom he mocked for painting outdoors.
Conservative in his social attitudes, he abhorred the scandal created by the
exhibitions, as well as the publicity and advertising that his
colleagues sought. He also deeply disliked being associated with the
term Impressionist, which the press had coined and popularized, and
insisted on including non-Impressionist artists such as Jean-Louis
Forain and Jean-François Raffaëlli in the group's exhibitions. The
resulting rancor within the group contributed to its disbanding in 1886.
Edgar Degas |
As his financial situation improved through sales of his own work, he was able to indulge his passion for collecting works by artists he admired: old masters such as El Greco and such contemporaries as Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Édouard Brandon. Three artists he idolized, Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier, were especially well represented in his collection. In the late 1880s, Degas also developed a passion for photography. He photographed many of his friends, often by lamplight, as in his double portrait of Renoir and Mallarmé. Other photographs, depicting dancers and nudes, were used for reference in some of Degas's drawings and paintings.
As the years passed, Degas became isolated, due in part to his belief that a painter could have no personal life. The Dreyfus Affair controversy brought his anti-Semitic leanings to the fore and he broke with all his Jewish friends. His argumentative nature was deplored by Renoir, who said of him: What a creature he was, that Degas! All his friends had to leave him; I was one of the last to go, but even I couldn't stay till the end.
Although he is known to have been working in pastel as late as the end of 1907, and is believed to have continued making sculptures as late as 1910, he apparently ceased working in 1912, when the impending demolition of his longtime residence on the rue Victor Massé forced him to move to quarters on Boulevard de Clichy. He never married and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, restlessly wandering the streets of Paris before dying in September 1917.
More information: Thought
Degas is often identified as an Impressionist, an understandable but insufficient description. Impressionism originated in the 1860s and 1870s and grew, in part, from the realism of such painters as Courbet and Corot. The Impressionists painted the realities of the world around them using bright, dazzling colors, concentrating primarily on the effects of light, and hoping to infuse their scenes with immediacy. They wanted to express their visual experience in that exact moment.
Technically, Degas differs from the Impressionists in that he continually belittled their practice of painting en plein air.
Degas, who believed that the artist must live alone, and his private life must remain unknown, lived an outwardly uneventful life.
During his life, public reception of Degas's work ranged from admiration to contempt. As a promising artist in the conventional mode, Degas had a number of paintings accepted in the Salon between 1865 and 1870. These works received praise from Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and the critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary. He soon joined forces with the Impressionists, however, and rejected the rigid rules and judgments of the Salon.
More information: Wiki Art
Only when he no longer knows what he is doing
does the painter do good things.
Edgar Degas
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