Edgar Degas, The Dance Class, c. 1874

Edgar Degas

1834–1917 · France

A Paris modernist who distrusted plein-air on principle ("daylight is too easy") and turned his studio into a laboratory of pastels fixed in layers, essence-stripped oil on paper, wax sculpture over wire armatures, and tracings of tracings that let him paint the same dancer for forty years.

ProcessMethodical TemperamentMeasured LineagePost-Impressionist

Signature moves

Refuse plein-air on technical grounds

Direct rejection: natural daylight is "too easy" — the high-value outdoor range gives the painter too much information and too little structural problem. The demanding condition was controlled artificial light: gas-light, oil-lamp, the moonlight-simulation he built in his studio.

Why it matters · Most Impressionist contemporaries treated outdoor light as the foundation of modern painting. Degas's position is the cleanest case for treating difficult artificial light as the structural problem. Painters who only paint outdoors miss what the studio chamber teaches.

Recorded by Paul Valéry, Degas, Danse, Dessin, 1938

Peinture à l'essence — wick the binder out of oil paint

Squeezed commercial oil paint onto blotting paper to wick out most of the drying oil binder, then restored viscosity with turpentine or oil of spike lavender. Result: thin, matte, fast-drying paint film with optical quality of distemper but pigment range of oil.

Why it matters · Most painters accept the commercial paint as a finished product. Degas treated it as raw material to be modified for the surface he wanted. Painters who never modify the medium accept whatever surface the tube produces.

Layered pastel with fixative between layers

Applied a layer of soft pastel, fixed it with spray fixative (probably shellac-based), applied the next layer, fixed it, and so on. Mature pastels have five, six, or more layers with optical depth pure single-pass pastel cannot produce.

Why it matters · A single pastel layer is a bright sketch. The layered method is a glazing analogue — the depth of an oil painting in a fugitive medium. Painters who use pastel only as single-pass sketch miss the full range.

Musée Thyssen-Bornemisza, Technical Study of At the Milliner's, 2017

Trace your own drawings — iterate poses across decades

Traced his own drawings extensively on semi-transparent paper. The tracing was iteration, not duplication. A dancer drawn in 1878 was traced and modified in 1881, retraced and modified in 1885, and the 1885 version re-entered the pool of source material.

Why it matters · Lets the painter redeploy a pose across decades of pictures without the original figure decaying into received convention. Most painters draw a figure once. Degas's system of traced iteration is the cleanest argument for treating drawing as a long-term archive.

Pastel over monotype

Pulled a monotype print (oil-based ink on metal plate, printed on dampened paper) and used the tonal ghost as a structural armature for pastel work laid directly over the dried ink.

Why it matters · The monotype gives a compositional and tonal base the pastel fills in. Many "counterproofs" — second impressions with almost no ink remaining — are almost invisible under the finished pastel. Painters who do not combine media miss what one medium can supply for the next.

Build sculpture and painting in parallel

For dancers and horses, modeled a three-dimensional version of the figure in wax at the same time he was painting the two-dimensional version. The sculpture and the painting informed each other.

Why it matters · The painted figure inherits the sculptural grasp of three-dimensional form; the sculpted figure inherits the specific gesture the drawings had isolated. Painters who never sculpt have trouble making bodies weigh.

In the studio

Photographic self-portrait of Edgar Degas, c. 1895 — Edgar Degas, photographic self-portrait, c. 1895 — taken by Degas himself in his Paris studio

Studio

Light: Controlled artificial light: gas-light, oil-lamp, moonlight simulation. Studio backstage of Paris Opéra, racetracks at dawn or dusk for racing scenes, private bathroom interiors.
Position: Studio working — refused plein-air. Worked across many media on a single sheet at times.
Session length: Working method built around iteration over decades. Same motifs (dancers, laundresses, women bathing, horses) returned to repeatedly.
Tools: Bottles of fixative, turpentine, blotting paper, scrapers · Custom shellac-based spray fixative for between pastel layers · Drying prints, monotype plates, wax figures on armatures · Wire armatures from found objects: corks, wine bottles, pieces of wood · Soft pastel sticks · Personal photograph collection (camera + Nadar prints) for poses life models could not hold
Notes: Studio described as a laboratory by visitors (Valéry, Halévy, Sickert). Eyesight deteriorated progressively from the 1880s. Late work in pastel, sculpture, and monotype is in part a direct response to failing vision.

Source: Paul Valéry, Degas, Danse, Dessin, 1938

Palette

Ground: Paper, board, prepared muslin, canvas — chosen by medium. Monotype plates as compositional bases for pastel.
Whites: Lead white
Earths: Standard earth range
Colors: Cadmium yellow · Cadmium orange · Vermilion · Viridian · Emerald green · Cobalt blue · Cerulean · French ultramarine · Adjacent mid-tones rather than strong chromatic contrasts
Medium: Multiple within a single work: pastel, distemper, peinture à l'essence, tempera, monotype, oil. Layered fixative-glazed pastel; essence-stripped oil; oil-based monotype ink.

Source: Theodore Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar Degas, 1976

Workflow, from blank canvas

1. The drawn study
Charcoal, pastel, graphite, ink drawings from the model in the studio under artificial light. Pose studied across many sheets, each with slight variations, until the specific "arabesque" had been internalized.
Why: Multiple studies grouped on a single sheet is the signature Degas sketchbook page.
2. The tracing
Traced his own drawings on semi-transparent paper. Each tracing modified — the previous version re-entered the pool of source material for the next.
Why: Iteration without the original figure decaying into received convention.
3. Transfer and composition
Composed image transferred to the final support (paper, board, canvas, monotype plate) by squaring up or direct tracing.
Why: Composition almost never worked out on the final support from scratch.
4. The medium pass
Pastel, essence, distemper, or oil applied in the layered method the specific medium required. Multiple fixed pastel layers; fast thin essence passes; tonal dead-coloring under final oil colour.
Why: Each medium has its own working logic; Degas matched the method to the medium per work.
5. Sculptural feedback
For dancers and horses, modeled three-dimensional version in wax at the same time as the two-dimensional version.
Why: Cross-media reinforcement — sculpture gives volume; drawing isolates gesture.
6. Infinite deferral
Rarely declared a work finished. Considered every painting and pastel a "moment in an unfinished longer project." Asked to borrow works back for further work as late as thirty years after sale.
Why: The unit of completion is not the work but the ongoing investigation.

Refusals — what they would not do

Refused plein-air painting on principle.
Refused the Romantic/Impressionist self-presentation as spontaneous observer.
Refused to declare works finished — borrowed them back for further work.
Refused to abandon difficult artificial-light subjects in favour of natural-light ones.
Refused single-medium discipline — combined pastel, essence, oil, monotype on single works.

Reference

Primary source: Direct life observation in the studio under controlled artificial light. Backstage at the Paris Opéra (had backstage privileges across decades). Racecourse at Longchamp. Professional models in the studio for the bathers.
Photography: Accomplished amateur photographer from the 1890s onward. Used systematically to study poses live models could not hold — suspended instant of dancer mid-jump, horse mid-gallop. Photograph collection included works by Nadar and by himself.

Exceptions

Personal collection of works by Delacroix, Ingres, Daumier, Manet, Gauguin, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Pissarro — the "Degas collection." Technical reference library as much as aesthetic one.
Ingres line as structural principle — first teacher Louis Lamothe was an Ingres pupil.

Lineage

Teachers

Louis Lamothe · from 1855 — École des Beaux-Arts. Lamothe was an Ingres pupil. The Ingres lineage is the decisive formation of Degas's drawing practice — primacy of line, study of figure in controlled light, rejection of impressionistic dissolution of form.
Italian Old Masters (1856–1859) · 1856–1859 — Naples, Florence, Rome. Copying in the Uffizi, particularly Renaissance portraiture and Mannerist figure drawing. The Italian formation gave him a classical armature the Impressionist moment did not overwrite.

Influences

Ingres — through Lamothe, line as structural principle.
Italian Renaissance portraiture and Mannerist figure drawing.
Velázquez and the Spanish tradition (via the Louvre).

Students

No formal atelier; took no paying students.
Walter Sickert — closest working relationship. Spent extended periods in Degas's studio in the 1880s and 1890s. Camden Town painting is the direct transmission of Degas's late studio method to twentieth-century British figurative painting.
Mary Cassatt — close colleague and technical collaborator, particularly in the 1890s monotype and color-print work.
Posthumous lineage runs through Sickert to Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. Contemporary figurative atelier movement cites him as a foundational reference for the drawn armature under painting.

In their own words

“Daylight is too easy. What I want is difficult — the atmosphere of lamps or moonlight.”

— Edgar Degas, Recorded by Paul Valéry, Degas, Danse, Dessin

Specific rejection of plein-air painting on technical grounds.

“No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know nothing.”

— Edgar Degas, Recorded by George Moore, Impressions and Opinions, 1890

Explicit rejection of the Romantic and Impressionist self-presentation as spontaneous observer.

“One must do the same subject over ten times, a hundred times. Nothing in art must seem accidental, not even movement.”

— Edgar Degas, Recorded by Paul Valéry, Degas, Danse, Dessin

Technical rationale for the series method and the tracing system.

“A painting is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist, it must never be a copy.”

— Edgar Degas, Recorded by his friends, various accounts

The position that sits in direct tension with Pissarro's and Monet's direct-observation doctrine.

Techniques and practices

Series Method

Painting the same motif dozens of times under different light, season, or mood—treating the series rather than the single canvas as the finished work.

Squaring Up from Studies

Transferring a small master sketch to a large canvas via a grid, preserving proportion across scale.

Iterative Characterization

Repeatedly painting, scraping, and repainting a single figure within a larger composition until the figure feels alive, not just accurate.

Lead-White Highlights

Reliance on lead white (flake white) for luminous, long-lasting highlights, especially on skin and metal.

If this painter is your match

You believe the painting is one moment in a longer investigation, not an object that finishes. The same subject is worth working for forty years.

Borrow this: Pick a single pose, object, or arrangement and draw it every day for a month. Trace each drawing the next day and modify the tracing. Work across media — charcoal, pastel, ink, gouache. Do not try to finish any of them.

Adjacent painters

Alphonse Mucha1860–1939

The Czech Art Nouveau master who spent eighteen years painting The Slav Epic—twenty canvases up to six meters wide—in a Bohemian castle, in a tempera-grassa medium he chose specifically because it stayed flexible enough that the finished paintings could be rolled and transported without cracking.

Ivan Kramskoy1837–1887

The intellectual strategist of the Peredvizhniki, whose studio ran on analytical silence, early photographic reference, and the conviction that a portrait was a biography rather than a likeness.

Vasily Surikov1848–1916

The Peredvizhniki monumental reconstructionist, who built history paintings like buildings—over years, from authentic artifacts, trained crowds of real faces, and a structural drawing logic inherited from Pavel Chistyakov.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau1825–1905

The Parisian academic master who ran his studio on a factory schedule—7 AM until dark, no lunch break—and resolved every figure, every fold, and every leaf in preparatory studies before a single brushstroke landed on the final canvas.

Shared the workbench

Other researched painters who used at least one of Degas’s techniques.

Claude Monet1840–1926

The French Impressionist who worked six canvases in parallel as the light shifted, swapping them out every fifteen minutes, and built the Giverny gardens as a living studio he could paint for forty years.

Paul Cézanne1839–1906

The Aix-en-Provence painter who walked to the same studio at dawn every day of his last decade, painted Mont Sainte-Victoire more than sixty times, and worked the canvas in small parallel color-planes until the whole surface held as a single harmony—the bridge from Impressionist observation to twentieth-century structure.

Maxfield Parrish1870–1966

The New Hampshire fantasy illustrator whose multi-layered glaze-and-varnish technique—monochrome underpainting, successive transparent color glazes, intermediate dammar varnish layers—produced the specific luminous surface of Daybreak (1922) and the "Parrish blue" palette that defined American commercial decoration between 1895 and 1935.

Ilya Repin1844–1930

The Peredvizhniki history painter and portraitist who worked from zenith-lit studios, standing, from long social sittings, and painted monumental scenes from years of field observation.

Ivan Shishkin1832–1898

The Peredvizhniki landscape master who lived in the forest in summer and reconstructed its anatomy in the studio in winter, using photography and projection as tools of discipline rather than shortcuts.

Vasily Surikov1848–1916

Primary sources

Paul Valéry, Degas, Danse, Dessin, 1938. Valéry was Degas's closest literary friend in the last two decades. The single most important primary literary source on Degas.
Daniel Halévy, My Friend Degas (Degas parle), 1960. Halévy kept a diary of Degas's visits and conversations from 1888 to 1903.
Musée Thyssen-Bornemisza, Technical Study of At the Milliner's (1882), 2017. Conservation department analysis. Documents the layered-pastel-with-fixative method, the paper support, and the sequence of compositional revisions.
Theodore Reff, The Notebooks of Edgar Degas (2 vols.), 1976. Scholarly edition of the 38 surviving Degas notebooks (1853–1886).
Metropolitan Museum of Art: Degas Studies Online. Met online scholarly resources on the Degas holdings — wax sculptures, monotypes, conservation studies of pastels and essences. [link]