Edgar Degas (July 19, 1834 - September 27, 1917) is widely considered the master of drawing the human figure in motion. His extraordinary draftsmanship, which stressed balance and clarity of outline, became a hallmark of his signature style.
Dance Foyer at the Opera
By Edgar Degas
Degas worked in many media, preferring pastel to all others. He is well known for his animated race horse paintings:
Race Horses
By Edgar Degas
But most of all, Degas is celebrated for his intimate, immediate renderings of nudes and ballerinas:
After the Bath, Woman Drying her Feet
By Edgar Degas
Fascinated with the movement of forms through space, Degas often sketched dancers from the theater wings, capturing his subjects with an unrivaled poignancy and power.
Blue Dancers (Les Danseuses Bleues)
By Edgar Degas
Degas is often classified as an Impressionist artist, which is an understandable but not entirely accurate description. While he did, like Impressionists, favor off-center compositions and scenes from everyday Parisian life, Degas never adopted the signature Impressionist color-fleck technique, and he was a not a fan of painting en plein air.
Nonetheless, Degas' paintings greatly impacted the world of Impressionist art and he is inexorably linked with the genre. And while he never formally mentored any specific pupils, Degas strongly influenced many notable artists, such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Mary Cassatt and Jean-Louis Forain.
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