Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was a French artist known for paintings, pastels, prints, and sculptures depicting dancers, horse races, and urban life. His compositions combine close observation with unusual viewpoints and asymmetrical framing.

Impressionism: A nineteenth-century art movement that explored contemporary life and changing effects of light through loose, visible brushwork. Degas exhibited with the Impressionists while pursuing more controlled drawing and composition than many of them.
Composition (visual arts): The arrangement of visual elements within an artwork. Degas structured scenes with off-center figures, diagonals, and abrupt cropping rather than balanced central tableaux.
The Ballet Class: An 1874 painting by Degas showing a ballet rehearsal in a dance studio. The work exemplifies his interest in rehearsal’s unposed gestures and the arrangement of figures across a room.
Mary Cassatt: An American painter and printmaker who lived in France and exhibited with the Impressionists. Cassatt and Degas shared artistic interests and exchanged ideas about printmaking and modern subjects.
Paris Opera Ballet: A French ballet company based at the Paris Opera, with a history dating to the seventeenth century. Its dancers and rehearsal spaces were central to Degas’s images of labor behind theatrical spectacle.
Ballet: A theatrical dance form built from codified steps, expressive movement, and choreographed performance. Ballet rehearsals and performances supplied Degas with recurring subjects and studies of bodies in motion.
Cropping (visual arts): The framing of an image by selecting which parts of a scene remain visible. Figures cut off at the edges make Degas’s scenes resemble momentary glimpses rather than posed displays.
The Dance Class: An 1870s painting by Degas depicting dancers and their instructor during a rehearsal. Its tilted perspective and scattered poses turn a studio interior into a carefully observed slice of modern life.
Édouard Manet: A French painter whose modern subjects and handling of paint helped shape nineteenth-century art. Manet was a close associate and artistic counterpart within Degas’s Parisian circle.
Dreyfus affair: A political crisis in France, beginning in 1894, over the wrongful conviction of Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus. Degas’s antisemitism and support for anti-Dreyfus positions fractured friendships and alienated former allies.

Linked from 15 pages