French painter and sculptor (1834-1917), especially famous for his representations of dancers.
(Hilaire Germain) (1834-1917) French Impressionist painter and sculptor. He devoted himself to lively, informal studies (often using pastels) of ballet, horse racing, and young women working. From the 1890s he turned increasingly to sculpture, modeling figures in wax in a fluent, naturalistic style.
Degas studied under a pupil of Ingres and worked in Italy in the 1850s, painting Classical themes. In 1861 he met Manet, and exhibited regularly with the Impressionists 1874–86. His characteristic style soon emerged, showing the influence of Japanese prints and photography in inventive compositions and unusual viewpoints, as in Woman with Chrysanthemums 1865 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). An example of his sculpture is The Little Dancer 1881 (Tate Gallery, London).
He entered the École des Beaux-Arts 1885 and in that year was introduced to the aged Ingres, of whom, in his regard for draftsmanship, he was a lifelong follower. He traveled in Italy 1855–58, making a careful study of the early Renaissance masters. He first attempted figure compositions on conventional lines, as in the several versions of his Young Spartans, but after 1865 gave up “history” and devoted himself to scenes of contemporary life and portraiture. Racecourse scenes were followed in the 1870s by the superb paintings of the theater and especially of the ballet, viewed in rehearsal, from the wings or from the auditorium, for which he is celebrated.
A visit to his brothers at New Orleans (where his mother’s family had settled after the Revolution) produced an interesting departure in his view of the Cotton Exchange, 1873 (Musée de Pau). In this decade he also exhibited with the Impressionists, having associated with Monet, Renoir and Sisley in their meetings at the Café Guerbois before the Franco-Prussian War (in which he served in a battery). While he is often termed an Impressionist he was in many ways quite distinct from the group. He had no great interest in landscape or in painting direct from nature. The representation of objects by areas of divided color and without outline offended the draftsman in him, while he believed in a carefully planned form of composition to which the Impressionist method was alien. If he gave a momentary “impression” like that of a dancer in movement it was not only by observation but by deliberately planned devices of composition. It is one of his merits to have introduced into art a new resource of arrangement departin
g from the conventional symmetry and balance of the past, in this making skillful use of the suggestions afforded by the Japanese print and even the photograph. Degas delighted in and experimented with many media, using oil, watercolor, pastel, etching, monotype, and aquatint, though it was in pastel that he produced his most brilliant effects of color.
From middle age onward he tended to concentrate increasingly on the study of women, adding to his dancers, in the 1880s, remarkable pastels and drawings of the “femme au tub”. Failing sight turned him to sculpture, which he called a “blind man’s art”, and his small bronzes of dancers or horses are of great beauty. Somewhat isolated, Degas had no direct following in France, though through his English pupil, Sickert, he may be said to have benefited English art.

To remove gas from. de-gas