Edgar Degas was intrigued by the human figure, and in his many images of ordinary women, he strove to capture the body in unusual and interesting positions.Degas was the only Impressionist to truly bridge the gap between traditional academic art and the radical movements of the early 20th century. He was a restless innovator who often set the pace for his younger colleagues. Acknowledged as one of the finest draftsmen of his age, Degas experimented with a wide variety of media, including oil, pastel, gouache, etching, lithography, monotype, wax modeling, and later in his career, photography. He was a renowned painter and sculptor, but he was most well known for his paintings of ballet dancers.
Degas was born in Paris, France; the eldest of …show more content…
Staying first with relatives in Naples, he later worked in Rome and Florence, filling notebooks with sketches of faces, historic buildings, and the landscape, and with hundreds of rapid pencil copies from frescoes and oil paintings he admired. Degas’s transition to modern subject matter, evident in Scene from the Steeplechase, was a long and gradual one, not an overnight conversion. Before he left Italy, he had made drawings of street characters and paintings of fashionable horse-riders, but always on a small scale. In 1859, Degas set out to make a name for himself as a painter. Degas continued his education by copying paintings at the Louvre; he was to remain an enthusiastic copyist well into middle age.In the early 1860s, while visiting his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon in Normandy, he made his first studies of horses. He also painted large portraits of family members and grand historical scenes such as "The Daughter of Jephtha," "Semiramis Building Babylon" and "Scene of War in the Middle Ages." Degas submitted these works to the all-powerful Salon, a group of French artists and teachers who presided over public exhibitions. In Paris in the early 1860s, his pictures of French racing events broke new ground both for their decidedly contemporary subject matter and for their surprising viewpoints and bold colours, which preceded the canvases of similar scenes by his renowned contemporary Édouard Manet. Degas’s portraits, too, at this time became less remote and more actively engaged with the top-hatted, restless world in which he lived. When he met Manet about 1862, Degas developed an affectionate but pointed rivalry with the slightly older man and soon shared something of Manet’s oppositional stance toward the artistic establishment and its traditional subject matter. Degas’s notebooks from these years teem with contrary possibilities for the direction of his art,
Degas was born in Paris, France; the eldest of …show more content…
Staying first with relatives in Naples, he later worked in Rome and Florence, filling notebooks with sketches of faces, historic buildings, and the landscape, and with hundreds of rapid pencil copies from frescoes and oil paintings he admired. Degas’s transition to modern subject matter, evident in Scene from the Steeplechase, was a long and gradual one, not an overnight conversion. Before he left Italy, he had made drawings of street characters and paintings of fashionable horse-riders, but always on a small scale. In 1859, Degas set out to make a name for himself as a painter. Degas continued his education by copying paintings at the Louvre; he was to remain an enthusiastic copyist well into middle age.In the early 1860s, while visiting his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon in Normandy, he made his first studies of horses. He also painted large portraits of family members and grand historical scenes such as "The Daughter of Jephtha," "Semiramis Building Babylon" and "Scene of War in the Middle Ages." Degas submitted these works to the all-powerful Salon, a group of French artists and teachers who presided over public exhibitions. In Paris in the early 1860s, his pictures of French racing events broke new ground both for their decidedly contemporary subject matter and for their surprising viewpoints and bold colours, which preceded the canvases of similar scenes by his renowned contemporary Édouard Manet. Degas’s portraits, too, at this time became less remote and more actively engaged with the top-hatted, restless world in which he lived. When he met Manet about 1862, Degas developed an affectionate but pointed rivalry with the slightly older man and soon shared something of Manet’s oppositional stance toward the artistic establishment and its traditional subject matter. Degas’s notebooks from these years teem with contrary possibilities for the direction of his art,