Edgar Degas was a French painter and sculptor who spent most of his working life drawing the dancers of the Paris Opera. He was born in Paris on July 19, 1834, and died in the same city on September 27, 1917.
His fame rests on his ballerinas, his pastels and a single sculpture, the Little Dancer, a wax ballet student in a real tutu who shocked visitors in 1881. He also refused to be called an Impressionist, even while he organized the Impressionists' exhibitions.
Behind those rehearsal rooms, his life took harder turns. Degas kept most of his sculpture to himself and slowly lost his sight, and a political scandal, the Dreyfus Affair, cost him his oldest friends.
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Degas began life with money. He was the eldest son of a Paris banker who ran a branch of the family bank.
He studied at the Lycée Louis le Grand, a prestigious secondary school in Paris, where he learned Latin, Greek and ancient history. His father often took him to the city's museums, and those visits counted for more than the career planned for him.
In November 1853 Edgar enrolled at the law faculty of the University of Paris, as a banker's son was expected to, and put little effort into it. Instead he registered as a copyist at the Louvre, which let him set up an easel in the galleries and copy the paintings.
In 1855 he met Ingres, the elderly leader of French classical painting, famous for portraits drawn with a clean, exact line. Degas revered him for the rest of his life. That April he entered the École des Beaux-Arts, the state art school in Paris.
Then came three years in Italy. Among his own relatives there, Degas found the subject of his first ambitious painting, a family in which husband and wife do not look at each other.
What You'll Discover
What happened to the money in 1874.
Why he hated the label Impressionist.
Who was standing in the wings.
Who the girl in the tutu was.
What ended his oldest friendships.
The year he stopped working.