A Paris message announces the death of the famous French painter Edgar Degas.
Edgar Degas was not only a thorough Frenchman but, what is not the same thing, a typical Parisian. It was at Paris that he was born on July 19, 1834, and he lived in Paris all his life, and in Montmartre for the greater part of it. When Degas first went to live in the ╥brain of France╙ it was becoming the resort of artistic rebels. Manet had started the movement away from the Latin Quarter by taking a studio in the quarter of Batignolles, adjoining Montmartre, when most of the new movements in French art have since issued.
The father of Degas was a banker of artistic tastes, and the young Edgar grew up in an artistic environment. After having gone through the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, he became a law student at the Sorbonne, but did not long remain there. His true vocation soon became obvious, and in 1854 he was already a pupil in the studio of Lamothe, who had himself been a pupil of Ingres.
In 1855 Edgar Degas entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but its academic atmosphere was not to his taste; he left after a few months, and in the following year started for Rome, where he remained two years, studying on his own account without a master. The artist who was afterwards to inspire virulent hostility as an innovator had a passionate admiration for the great masters of the past; his favourites were Rembrandt, the great Italians ╤ especially Ghirlandaio and Botticelli, ╤ and Holbein. He did not share the exaggerated admiration of his contemporaries for Raphael and his degenerate Roman followers. While he was at Rome Degas made many drawings after the Italian masters, who undoubtedly had a permanent influence on his art. Until 1865 he devoted himself chiefly to historical painting, but it is in his portraits of that period that his personality is already evident. It was in 1865 that he appeared for the first time at the Salon with a ╥Scene de Guerre au Moyen-age,╙ which passed unnoticed by the critics and the public, but won for the painter the warm congratulations of Puvis de Chavannes.
In ╥La Femme aux chrysanthemes,╙ painted in 1865, we find already the qualities of the great artist that Degas became; it is from this picture that his real career as a painter dates. In the following year he exhibited at the Salon a picture of a steeple-chase, the first of a long series of racing scenes which are among his most characteristic productions. The Franco-German War interrupted Degas╒ artistic activity; during the war he served in a battalion commanded by the late M. Henri Rouart, who afterwards bought several of his works, including the famous ╥Danseuses a la barre,╙ the sale of which in 1912 for more than ú19,000 will be remembered. In 1872 Degas returned to work, and began the long series of theatrical pictures which have made him famous. In that year he painted the ╥Ballet de Robert le Diable,╙ now in the Ionides Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum; the ╥Danseuses a la barre╙ was painted five years later, and marks the beginning of a transition to a new and bolder technique. In between came several wonderful pictures of the ballet, many of which are now in the Camondo Collection in the Louvre, and among other superb works of this period are ╥Le Viol,╙ ╥La Dame au miroir╙ in M. Doucet╒s collection, and ╥L╒Absinthe╙ in the Camondo Collection. The last picture was much discussed and violently attacked, especially when it was exhibited at the Grafton Galleries in 1893; the man seated at the table is a striking portrait of Desboutins, the engraver, a friend of Degas and also of Manet, by whom there is a very fine portrait of him.
Degas took part in 1874 in the first exhibition of the group of artists afterwards to be known as ╥Impressionists,╙ and in all their subsequent exhibitions up to the last, held in 1886, but he was not himself an Impressionist. Not only did he object to the name, which he declared to be meaningless, but he never adopted the technique of those to whom the name is properly applied, nor did he even paint in the open air. Even his pictures of the racecourse were painted in the studio from studies aided by memory. Nevertheless, he was to some extent influenced by the Impressionists, and the change in his technique which is to be observed about 1877 is probably to be attributed, in part at least, to that influence. From about that date his method becomes much broader ╤ one might almost say more brutal ╤ and his colour more vivid and daring. He also began to use a great deal the medium of pastel, to which he ultimately almost entirely confined himself. About 1883 he began a series of studies of the nude, which are among his most remarkable works and of which he contributed a considerable number to the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. Since that date he continued to paint the same sort of subjects, but simplified his method more and more. Without ever losing the purity of his line, he escaped from that over-elaboration which is the pitfall of the artist, and produced his desired effects with the least possible means. Movement and light interested him above all, and his latest works are rapid studies of movement in daring effects of light.
Personally Degas was a man of peculiar character. He had a brilliant and mordant wit which lost him many friends and made him many enemies, for it must be admitted that his remarks were often ill-natured. His reported ╥mots╙ are legion and probably not all historical. He hated charlatanism, pretence, and self-advertisement and had no mercy on those whom he believed (perhaps not always with good reason) to be guilty of those weaknesses. But he was a delightful talker in his best moods, always ready with brilliant repartee, a born Parisian with the Parisian habit of mocking at everything. To young artists whom he believed to be serious and sincere he was kind and encouraging, but he had very few pupils.
In his last years Degas was rather sad and lonely. His old friends were either dead or (by his own fault) estranged from him. At the time of the Dreyfuss affair he became violently anti-Dreyfussard and chauvinist whereas most of his friends were in the opposite camp. They were ready to agree to differ, but Degas was not; many of them tried to renew relations when the ╥affair╙ was over, but Degas was obdurate, and more angry than ever with them for having proved to be in the right. He did not find many congenial spirits among his new political associates, and in his old age was left almost entirely alone. Moreover, for several years before his death, he had been unable to paint on account of his failing eyesight, and this increased his melancholy. He found amusement in making figures of dancers in wax, which showed that he might have been a great sculptor had he wished.
