Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas painted dancers obsessively and disliked being called an Impressionist. Born in Paris in 1834 into a wealthy banking family, he began a law degree to satisfy his father, abandoned it, trained under a pupil of Ingres, and spent three years in Italy copying the Renaissance masters. Ingres reportedly told him to draw lines, many lines, and he did so for sixty years; drawing rather than colour is the foundation of his work. He began as a history painter and turned to modern subjects in the 1860s under Manet's influence. He exhibited in seven of the eight Impressionist shows and organised several, while rejecting the label and the practice: he had no interest in painting outdoors, in spontaneity or in weather, worked entirely in the studio from drawings and memory, and said no art was less spontaneous than his. His subjects are the ballet, the racecourse, milliners, laundresses, orchestras and women bathing — chosen for movement and for the moment when a body is doing something rather than posing. The compositions borrow from photography and Japanese prints: figures cropped by the frame, high viewpoints, empty foregrounds, the principal action pushed to the edge. He worked increasingly in pastel as his sight failed, and modelled in wax; the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, exhibited in 1881 with real hair and a fabric tutu, was condemned as ugly. He was solitary and difficult, and his conduct during the Dreyfus affair — he was a vocal antisemite and broke with Jewish friends — is not excused by the period. He went nearly blind and died in 1917.

• Lived: 1834 CE – 1917 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: painter, sculptor