With the head, with Manet, of the impressionist movement, the “painter of the dancers”, but also of the modistes, the racecourses and the coffees, causes the admiration of his contemporaries and the respect of the young artists of his time, which does not prevent it from affirming its life during a solid principle of independence and a major taste for modernity.

Assiduous student of old and modern painting - it has signed works Greco, Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, Manet, Gauguin, Cézanne -, Edgar Degas is also the demanding artist whose Odilon Redon will be able to say: “It is on him that the principle will be always discussed independence. Degas would be entitled to its name registered with the top of the temple.

Respect here, absolute respect”. In one half-century of activity, it carries out some 2000 tables and pastels, 74 sculptures, more than 200 monotypes, 68 engravings and of the hundreds of drawings. But this endowed artist, who, born in an easy family, profits from the best formation, would not be Degas without the formidable crisis of the years 1870, which leads it to break with Ingres and his disciples to devote itself to entirely original research which will make of him a headlight for the generations to come.

Since its birth, on on July 19th, 1834, Edgar de Gas, the elder one of the five children of a banker, is intended to make career in finance. He follows traditional studies to the Louis-the-Large college, in Paris, obtains his arts baccalaureat, then is registered with the Faculty of Law. But Edgar, who impassions itself for the drawing and painting, under investigation devotes all his free moments old Masters to the museum of Louvre and the cabinet of the Prints of the imperial Library. To twenty and one years, he forsakes the right and between to the School of the fine arts, where he fits in the workshop of Louis Lamothe, an academic painter near to Ingres. His/her father follows of an interested eye, sometimes critical, his beginnings in painting.

For better preparing at the cost of Rome, it embarks for Italy, country of origin of its paternal family, where it remains during three years. It copies the tables of the museums, follows the courses of the evening to the Médicis villa and becomes acquainted with some painters. Parallel to its studies according to the old Masters, it paints portraits posed by its close relations. It starts in 1858-1859 a large table in the manner of Holbein or of Van Dyck, representing his uncle, his aunt and their two young girls, the Bellelli Family, masterpiece of these years of training. Around 1860, it paints portraits close to the linearism of Ingres and historical subjects (Sémiramis building Babylon, 1861).

Of return to Paris, Degas starts truly its career of painter. Still unknown to the public, the amateurs and the merchants, he saw comfortable pension which his/her father pours to him. He rents a workshop in IXe district, of which he will hardly any more move away from all his life; he attends the coffee of News-Athens there. In 1865, it exposes for the first time to the Living room, with Scène of war to the Middle Ages, a historical table of inspiration. It gives up soon this kind to turn to modern subjects: , spectacle horse-races of opera, ballerina. It is fascinated by “scandalous” the painting of its contemporaries Courbet and Manet. With the Guerbois coffee, it joint with the meetings of a group of artists: Monet, Astruc, Bracquemond, Bazille, Fantin-Latour, Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro.

Very quickly, Degas appears, with Manet, like the leader of a new esthetic school which, after the war free-Prussian, is constituted in association of artists in order to organize exposures without jury. Degas thus embraces the cause of realism and, in 1872-1873, during a voyage with New-Orleans, cradle of its maternal family, her artistic project formulates: “To make the movement naturalist worthy of the universities.” From this stay a table goes back to a penetrating truth, the Market of cotton, also called Portraits painted in an office.

But, soon, Degas turns, like Manet, to a divergent pictorial way: the first exposure of the group, called “impressionist” by the critic Louis Leroy, is held in the workshop of the Nadar photographer, in April and May 1874. The event makes scandal. The press blames the artists to represent only surface visual impressions, without worrying about the academic rules of composition and harmony of colors. Their fabrics appear unfinished, their colors, from where the blacks and the gray shades are excluded, like strident and artificial. Being unaware of criticisms, Degas engages more and more deeply in its research, multiplying the technical experiments. He works with sticks of pastel dry or wet to obtain molten effects or with pure pigments which he fixes on paper using a brush soaked in a solution of water and adhesive. He likes the velvety and opaque aspect of these matters, their flexible and alive character, which preserves the gestural invoice. The pastel and the gouache make it possible to represent spontaneous visual impressions. They are opposed to the more elaborate work of the oil-base paint. In its tables, indeed, Degas leaves often visible the work of the hand, the trace of the brushstrokes charged with a very fluid matter, almost diaphanous. Not worrying to give a priori to its fabrics a finished and licked aspect, it attempts to translate on some features and the coloured surfaces the essential character of its reason.

Only its portraits are worked in a realistic way. Its family and her friends pose for him. Because of the close emotional ties of the painter with his model, these portraits express a deep psychological truth. In the scenes of group, Degas sticks to a restricted number of subjects: ironers, horse-races (Before the departure, 1862), ballets (the Class of dance, 1874; Dancer at the bar, 1880). Its weak interest for the landscape distinguishes it from the other impressionists, amateurs of subjects of outdoor. The scenes with several characters are pretexts with searchs for new compositions, where the reason appears truncated, often crossed into two, decentred or asymmetrical. Degas thus seeks to fix, as in instantaneous photographic, a fragment of reality. This spontaneous vision is paradoxically the result of a complex development. Degas multiplies the sketches on the sharp one and sets up its final composition in workshop. One does not count any more, for example, the dancers outlined with the charcoal or painting with the gasoline on the papers of color, then transposed on fabrics.

During years, the small rats of the Opera being exerted with the bar, in repetition, on scene or at rest constitute the favorite topic of its painting. Degas will obtain rather late an authorization to work on the spot, with the Opera: the dancers thus come to pose at his place and it then composes of imagination its table. Its dancers and its racehorses preserve the savor of reality however, while making the synthesis of personal experiences and varied influences, like, for the horses, English painting and the Japanese prints. Parallel to painting, Degas practices the sculpture, modelling in wax of the series of dancers, Women with their toilet (1885-1898) and horses. Its more famous statue, Small Dancer the fourteen year old, equipped with true clothing, a ribbon tied in the hair, creates the scandal when it is presented to the sixth impressionist exposure.

At 46 years, Degas enjoys a well established reputation and, in the years 1880, its work gains a growing success. After the last impressionist exposure, in 1886, he abstains from taking part in the collective artistic events. He carries out a regulated existence, almost exclusively devoted to work. Single person, it surrounds himself by some selected friends. This containment in the practices allows him, paradoxically, the greatest audacities in its work.

To the topics of predilection of the years 1870 comes to be added a series of works on the modistes. The hats, decorated multiples fanfreluches, essential accessories of the female desire to look elegant, are pretexts with a riot of color and animated forms. The woman is omnipresent in the tables of maturity, but it is more the treatment of space than the subject which holds the attention of the artist. Most its compositions are taken from a raised point of view, in view from above. The characters are introduced in brought closer sight, in a theatrical light. The spectator enters the intimacy of the model, women surprised with their toilet, sights of back or profile, cambering himself under the bite of the comb in their thick and blazing hair.

The sight trouble from which Degas has suffered for several years worsens with the age. Are its reduced faculties at the origin of the increasingly large abstraction of works of its last period? At the end of the century, Degas takes again with enthusiasm the pastels of its youth. He works in large size the frantic gesticulation of the Russian dancers, his “riots of color” as he calls them, and draws the naked ones without slackening, using tracing paper in order to take again his drawing without overloading it nor to destroy it. He practices also modelling out of wax or plasteline.

In 1910, become blind, it ceases working. He dies seven years later, of a stroke. Degas leaves the image of a being sensitive, spiritual and distinguished, intransigent for all that touches with art, and keeping, like all the geniuses, the power to disturb.