Edgar Degas was an eminent painter, sculptor, and drawer, who is credited with transmogrifying the art world and prompting the commencement of an artistic movement. He was a highly celebrated nineteenth century French Impressionist whose work assisted in shaping the fine art landscape for years to come. Degas often referred to himself as a realist due to the way in which he represented subject matters truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and supernatural elements.
Degas was born in 1834, as the scion of an aristocratic banking family. He was educated in the classics, including Latin, Greek, and ancient history, at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. His father discerned his son’s artistic gifts early, and invigorated his efforts in drawing by taking him frequently to Paris museums. Degas began by facsimile Italian Renaissance paintings at the Louvre, and indoctrinated in the studio of Louis Lamothe, who taught in the traditional academic style, with its emphasis on line and its insistence on the pivotal importance of draftsmanship. As …show more content…
He favored scenes of ballet dancers, laundresses, milliners (At the Milliner’s, 1882;29.100.38), and of Parisian low life. This is why he would later be regarded as one or the most prominent realist painters. His attentiveness in ballet dancers intensified in the 1870s, and consequently he created about 1,500 works featuring ballet or ballet related things. Degas’s paintings are not traditional portraits, rather studies that address kinesiology, or exploring the physicality and discipline of the dancers by means of the use of contorted postures and unexpected vantage points. In Dancer Adjusting Her Slipper (1873; 29.100.941), the figure’s pose is difficult to decipher, it is viewed from a steep angle with both her feet and her head at the bottom of the picture, yet it conveys a sense of the dancer’s