Edgar Degas Art Prints

He was born in Paris to a banker and a Creole mother from New Orleans, and enrolled in law school to please his father, then put little effort into it. In 1855 he met Ingres, and never forgot his advice: “Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory.” He trained as a history painter, and Young Spartans Exercising, begun around 1860, belongs to that ambition. X-rays show he kept changing the youths' faces, positions and even their number, which left the four women in the foreground with ten legs between them.

Money shaped the dancers. After his father died in 1874 he sold his house and inherited collection to pay his brother René's debts, and had to live from his art for the first time. He mostly showed dancers backstage or in rehearsal, as professionals doing a job. In The Ballet Class, look past the silver-haired teacher, Jules Perrot, for the mothers along the back wall, a watering can for damping the dusty floor, a small dog and a girl on the left stretching her back. In the pastel Waiting, the view drops steeply onto a dancer and her chaperone, as if from a box above the auditorium.

Outside the theatre he painted cafés and racecourses. L'Absinthe (1875–76) sets the actress Ellen Andrée beside the etcher Marcellin Desboutin in a Paris café; critics called it ugly on its first showing, and London found it degraded in 1893. By the later 1870s he had mastered pastel, a dry medium that let him join his gift for line to a growing interest in colour. The Met's Race Horses, dated to about 1885–88, is pastel laid on wood. In the late 1880s he also took up photography, shooting friends by lamplight and using photographs of dancers as reference for drawings and paintings.

In later years he grew isolated. The Dreyfus Affair hardened his antisemitism and he broke with his Jewish friends. His eyesight failed, he stopped working around 1912, and he died in Paris in 1917, nearly blind and never married.