Degas at the Races: Introduction
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 | Self-Portrait, c. 1855 red chalk on laid paper National Gallery of Art, Washington, Woodner Family Collection |
Born in 1834 to a wealthy Parisian family, Edgar Degas could also claim Italian heritage. His grandfather had established himself in Naples and many of his relatives lived in and around that city. A branch of the family also resided in New Orleans. Thus, the Degas family extended across three countries: France, Italy, and America. As a young man Degas traveled in Italy, where he discovered the Old Masters in visits to churches and museums, such as the Uffizi in Florence. Back in France, he studied art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Degas' instructor had been a pupil of the great neoclassical artist and supreme draftsman Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who was Degas' idol. Degas met Ingres once; the master told the young student, "Draw lines, young man. Many lines." Degas followed Ingres' advice and also became a dedicated student of contemporary life and a passionate experimenter with artistic techniques and strategies. Among his most notable subjects were the urban life of Paris and the amusements of the French--from hat-shop clerks and laundresses at work, to the ballet, cabaret, and horse racing.
In light of his interest in contemporary subjects, it is not surprising that Degas was drawn to newly popular equestrian sports. His fascination with the horse was an important element of his work in virtually every medium--paintings, pastels, drawings, prints, and wax. Not only was horse racing a modern form of entertainment, which, like the Parisian ballet, was a superb source for the study of movement and athletic grace, but it was also, like dance, marked by a controlled tension and discipline that captivated the artist.
Degas may be credited with originating new means of pictorial expression. He expanded the artistic ideas of generations of French artists and brought an unprecedented psychological dimension to the subjects he chose. His greatest gift was his ability to use visual strategies--unusual perspective, expressive color, and cropped compositions--to capture inner realities.
As Degas himself acknowledged, the sophistication of his works derived from study and experimentation. Unlike many of the impressionists, who worked in a spontaneous manner in front of their subjects, Degas developed his final compositions from life sketches, which he later worked and reworked in his studio. He sketched constantly, usually concentrating not on an entire composition but on figures or fragments of figures, and on capturing movement and gesture. Degas amassed hundreds of such sketches in notebooks and often used studies he had made decades earlier in his trial-and-error process of combining figures and motifs. There is no question that, once incorporated in his finished works, these fragments have a natural eloquence that reveals Degas' powerful understanding of pictorial issues and his keen observation of character and milieu.
Boggs, Jean Sutherland. Degas. New York, 1996.
Boggs, Jean Sutherland. Degas [exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art] (New York, 1988).
Herbert, Robert L. Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society. New Haven, 1988.
Millard, Charles W. The Sculpture of Edgar Degas. Princeton, N.J., 1976.
Sturman, Shelley, and Barbour, Daphne. "The Materials of the Sculptor," Apollo Magazine (August 1995), 49-54.