Edgar Degas

Degas called his studio a laboratory, and the description was literal. Visitors in the 1890s and 1900s described a space cluttered with bottles of fixative and turpentine, colored powders, scrapers, blotting paper, drying prints, wax figures on armatures, and the accumulated residue of three decades of technical experiment. The studio was a working chemistry bench, not a finished showroom. Paul Valéry, Daniel Halévy, and Walter Sickert all left first-hand accounts of the atmosphere: tightly controlled, private, and densely material.

Degas rejected plein-air painting on explicit technical grounds. His position, stated repeatedly, was that natural daylight was "too easy"—the high-value outdoor range gave 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 for certain night scenes. The backstage of the Paris Opéra, the private bathroom interiors, the racetracks at dawn or dusk—his subjects are all scenes under specific, difficult lighting conditions chosen for their structural complexity.

His daily routine was obsessive and repetitive. He worked on the same motifs across decades: the ballet dancers of the Opéra, the laundresses, the women bathing, the horses and jockeys of Longchamp. These were not separate projects. They were continuous iterative investigations of the same set of problems. A Degas dancer drawn in 1874 and a Degas dancer drawn in 1894 are part of the same ongoing work.

He was profoundly private about his process. Models were permitted; most visitors were not. His eyesight deteriorated progressively from the 1880s onward, and the late work in pastel, sculpture, and monotype is in part a direct response to failing vision—the soft, large-scale mark of the pastel stick was possible when the fine brush of the early oils had become difficult.

Degas was the most technically inventive painter of the Impressionist generation. He did not restrict himself to any single medium. A Degas work might combine pastel, distemper, peinture à l'essence, tempera, monotype, and oil on a single sheet. The technical decisions were subject-specific.

Peinture à l'essence was Degas's most distinctive oil method. He 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. The result was a thin, matte, fast-drying paint film with the optical quality of distemper but the pigment range of oil. The technique produced the specific chalky, low-gloss surface of many of his ballet paintings and let him work on paper, board, and prepared muslin as well as on canvas. The trade-off is durability—the under-bound essence film is fragile and many of the essence paintings have significant long-term preservation problems.

For pastel he developed a layered glazing method analogous to oil glazing. He applied a layer of soft pastel, fixed it with a spray fixative (composition debated by conservators but probably shellac-based), applied the next layer, fixed it, and so on. The fixative set each layer firmly enough that the next layer could be worked over it without lifting the underlying color. The mature pastels—the late bathers, the last dancers—have five, six, or more pastel layers with optical depth that pure single-pass pastel cannot produce. Museo Thyssen's technical study of At the Milliner's has documented the layer structure.

Pastel over monotype was another signature. Degas 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. The monotype gave him a compositional and tonal base the pastel filled in; many of the "counterproofs"—second impressions with almost no ink remaining—are almost invisible under the finished pastel.

For sculpture he modeled in wax, sculptor's clay, and plastiline over wire armatures built from found objects: corks, wine bottles, pieces of wood. The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1881, the only Degas sculpture exhibited in his lifetime) used a real tutu and hair ribbon on the wax figure. After his death in 1917 the heirs had roughly seventy of the wax figures cast in bronze by the Hébrard foundry; the original waxes are now at the Mellon Collection.

His palette across the oils and pastels was chromatically bright—cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, vermilion, viridian, emerald green, cobalt blue, cerulean, French ultramarine, and the standard whites—but used with a specific preference for adjacent mid-tones rather than strong chromatic contrasts.

A Degas work began with drawing and ended with drawing. Nothing in the sequence was linear; the process was iterative from first to last mark.

First: the drawn study. Degas drew constantly. Charcoal, pastel, graphite, and ink drawings from the model, usually in the studio under artificial light. A pose was not captured in a single drawing—it was studied across many sheets, each with slight variations, until the specific "arabesque" of the movement had been internalized. Multiple studies grouped on a single sheet is the signature Degas sketchbook page.

Second: the tracing. Degas traced his own drawings extensively, often on semi-transparent paper. The tracing was not duplication; it was iteration. 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 for the next painting. The tracing system let him redeploy a pose across decades of pictures without the original figure decaying into received convention.

Third: the transfer and composition. The composed image was transferred to the final support—paper, board, canvas, monotype plate—by squaring up or direct tracing. The composition was almost never worked out on the final support from scratch.

Fourth: the medium pass. Pastel, essence, distemper, or oil, applied in the layered method the specific medium required. For the pastels, multiple fixed layers; for the essences, fast thin passes; for the oils, tonal dead-colorings under final color.

Fifth: the sculptural feedback. For certain subjects—particularly the dancers and the horses—Degas 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. The painted figure inherits the sculptural grasp of three-dimensional form; the sculpted figure inherits the specific gesture the drawings had isolated.

Sixth: the infinite deferral. Degas rarely declared a work finished. Valéry, his closest literary friend, recorded that Degas considered every painting and pastel a "moment in an unfinished longer project." Collectors had to negotiate to get works away from him; he asked to borrow them back for further work as late as thirty years after sale. The unit of completion was not the work but the ongoing investigation.

Degas worked from a combination of direct life observation and an extensive personal photograph and drawing archive. He was an accomplished amateur photographer from the 1890s onward and used the camera systematically to study poses the live model could not hold—the suspended instant of a dancer mid-jump, a horse mid-gallop, the specific angle of a laundress pressing the iron. His photograph collection included works by Nadar and by himself, taken in the studio under controlled artificial lighting that let him study the shadow structure of a figure in difficult positions.

His primary reference for the dancer series was the Paris Opéra, where he had backstage privileges across decades. The paintings are not staged recreations; they are drawn from the actual rehearsal rooms, the actual foyer de danse, the actual wings of the Palais Garnier and its predecessor. The racecourse paintings were drawn from direct observation at Longchamp and at the English courses he visited. The bathers were drawn from professional models in the studio in controlled poses.

He had an immense personal collection of works by other artists—Delacroix, Ingres, Daumier, Manet, Gauguin, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Pissarro—the so-called Degas collection, dispersed at auction after his death in 1918. The collection is a technical reference library as much as an aesthetic one; Degas studied these works directly in his own rooms as material references for his own technical choices. The Ingres influence on his drawing discipline is particularly direct: his first teacher, Louis Lamothe, had been an Ingres pupil, and Degas absorbed the Ingres line as a structural principle.

Degas was born into a Parisian banking family and received a classical bourgeois education. In 1855 he entered the École des Beaux-Arts under Louis Lamothe, himself a pupil of Ingres. The Ingres lineage is the decisive formation of Degas's drawing practice: the primacy of line, the study of the figure in controlled light, the rejection of impressionistic dissolution of form.

He spent 1856-1859 in Italy—Naples, Florence, Rome—copying in the Uffizi and studying the Italian Old Masters, particularly Renaissance portraiture and Mannerist figure drawing. The Italian formation gave him a classical armature the Impressionist moment did not overwrite.

He joined the Impressionist group for the 1874 first exhibition but maintained an adversarial relationship to the plein-air project the group was organized around. His specific technical disagreement—that natural daylight was too easy—put him at odds with Monet and Pissarro throughout their shared institutional history. He exhibited in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions but argued against the name "Impressionist" and insisted on "Independent" for himself.

He had no formal atelier and took no paying students. His closest working relationships were with the British painter Walter Sickert, who spent extended periods in Degas's studio in the 1880s and 1890s and whose Camden Town painting is the direct transmission of Degas's late studio method to twentieth-century British figurative painting. Mary Cassatt was a close colleague and technical collaborator, particularly in the monotype and color-print work of the 1890s. His posthumous lineage runs through Sickert to Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach; the contemporary figurative atelier movement cites him as a foundational reference for the drawn armature under painting.