Degas

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) was a founding member of the Impressionist group and exhibited at seven of the eight independent Impressionist exhibitions. He nonetheless remained somewhat aloof from the other painters and diverged in several important ways from the other practitioners of the style. Born to a wealthy family and classically trained, Degas did not need to support himself by selling his art. He disliked the term "Impressionist" and considered himself a Realist or a Naturalist. Unlike Monet, Pissarro and Renoir, Degas was not interested in painting landscape en plein air, nor was he concerned with the changing effects of light on form. He did share an interest in the fleeting moment, and his compositions show the influence of photography (which he also practiced) in their framing, where we find figures cut off by the frame in a seemingly spontaneous view of a fragmented whole. This very modern vision is seen in A Woman with Chrysanthemums (1865), where the flowers dominate the center of the image while the female subject gazes off outside of the picture frame, her body dissected by the edge of the canvas. This portrait of a private moment of contemplation displays both Degas's strong draughtsmanship in the woman's form and his use of saccadic brushstrokes in the flowers. The same is true in At the Milliner's (1882). A pastel glimpse at an insignificant scene of daily life in bourgeois Paris, the female shopper (whose model may have been Mary Cassatt) gazes at her own reflection, cut off physically and psychologically from the salesgirl who is obscured by the mirror. The spontaneous feeling of Degas's images was the result of much deliberation and planning. The artist admitted "I assure you that no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament."
 
Like many of the Impressionists, Degas had certain subjects he turned to frequently, reworking them over and over in a variety of circumstances. But where Monet's series treated inanimate objects (Rouen Cathedral, haystacks, the Japanese bridge), Degas was particularly interested in the human form and in movement, and three of his favorite subjects were ballet dancers, women in their bath and horses at the races. In the numerous studies of young dancers, both in the studio (The Ballet Class), at the barre and on stage (The Ballet at "Robert le Diable"), Degas portrays the women absorbed in their practice or performance, suggesting bodies in motion through the rhythmic application of paint. The scenes of bathing women (Woman Bathing in Shallow Tub) function both as investigations of intimate moments in almost anti-portraits, where the body is privileged over the face, personality or identity of the woman, and as studies in form and composition, in the tight framing and cramped compositions that push outside of the tub and the frame. In other images of women, such as The Laundress and Woman having her Hair brushed, the subject is absorbed in her activity, unaware of a viewer examining this random moment in the continuum of life, very much in keeping with a snapshot aesthetic. Degas's portraits (The Collector of Prints; Tissot; Manet) are psychologically intimate while again offering a glimpse into an intimate and fleeting moment in the life of an artist. In the two oil paintings, the individual takes his place in a world of images, and there is some reference to Manet's 1868 portrait of Zola.