The Ballet Class. Edgar Degas · Public domain · source

Edgar Degas

Public domain1834-1917·French·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Born in Paris on 19 July 1834, he died there on 27 September 1917, aged 83. A painter, pastellist, printmaker and sculptor of dancers, cafe singers, jockeys, milliners and women bathing. His eyes were found to be defective during rifle training in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and after 1890 his sight failed until he was nearly blind.

Why they matter

He showed with the Impressionists but painted like no one else among them: indoors, under stage light, backstage and in the wings, in the millinery shop and the cafe-concert. He made about 300 monotypes, often reworked with pastel, and his one exhibited sculpture, the Little Dancer, was called by the critic Joris-Karl Huysmans "the first truly modern attempt at sculpture I know".

What to buy

Prints: the National Gallery in London sells made-to-order prints from its own photography of its Degas pictures - Young Spartans Exercising, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, Combing the Hair, After the Bath - and these are the prints to buy. Books: the standard one-volume Degas is the catalogue of the 1988-89 Paris, Ottawa and New York retrospective, Degas by Jean Sutherland Boggs with Douglas Druick, Henri Loyrette, Michael Pantazzi and Gary Tinterow (The Met): 392 works across every medium he used, easily found second-hand. Originals: not realistic. The paintings, pastels and monotypes are museum and major-auction pieces. The bronze dancers and horses sold at auction were all cast after his death by the Hebrard foundry, marked "CIRE PERDUE AA HEBRARD"; later casts issued between 2004 and 2016 by Airaindor-Valsuani are controversial. Treat any "Degas bronze" without the Hebrard mark and a documented history as a reproduction.

Notes

The Ballet Class and L'Absinthe are at the Musee d'Orsay, Young Spartans Exercising at the National Gallery in London. The Met's bronze Little Dancer, cast in 1922, came with the H. O. Havemeyer bequest of 1929. The original wax Little Dancer is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, from the collection of Paul Mellon. He was an outspoken antisemite and anti-Dreyfusard until his death.

Story

Degas modelled sculpture in wax, and showed exactly one piece in public. At the sixth Impressionist exhibition, in 1881, he put up a wax figure of a girl from the Paris Opera ballet school, Marie van Goethem, and dressed her: a real linen bodice, a muslin tutu, satin slippers, a wig of real hair and a ribbon. Huysmans hailed it as the first truly modern sculpture; another critic saw in her face "the hateful promise of every vice".

He never exhibited another. The rest of his sculpture stayed in the studio.

When he died in 1917, his heirs found about 150 wax figures in the studio. The foundry owner Adrien Hebrard judged that 74 could survive casting, and from 1919 to 1936 the Hebrard foundry cast them in bronze. The bronze Little Dancers now in museums around the world - the Met's was cast in 1922, with a new tutu - were all made after his death. Degas, who is famous as the sculptor of the Little Dancer, never saw her in bronze.

The wax original, with her real hair, is the one he made. Paul Mellon acquired her in 1956, and she is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Key works

Young Spartans Exercising (c. 1860) - National Gallery, London
The Dance Class (1874) - The Met, New York
Ballet at the Paris Opera (1877) - Art Institute of Chicago
The Millinery Shop (1879-1886) - Art Institute of Chicago
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (wax) (c. 1880) - National Gallery of Art, Washington

Edgar Degas

Who

Why they matter

What to buy

Notes

Story

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Prints

Books

See also