Edgar Degas

The most technically unconventional of the Impressionist circle, and the one most resistant to the label. Degas preferred 'Realist' or 'Independant' — he almost never painted outdoors and depended heavily on studio work, preparatory drawing and the kind of careful composition that en-plein-air painters scorned. His great subject was movement, observed rather than posed: ballet dancers stretching, adjusting their shoes or waiting in the wings; jockeys on horses; women at their toilette caught at unguarded angles that no painting had previously attempted. The influence of Japanese prints and of photography — both then newly available in Paris — is everywhere in the cropped compositions and tilted viewpoints. The ballet appears in more than half his total output, but Degas was not interested in glamour. He painted the labor of it: the rehearsal room rather than the stage, the muscular effort of the leg extended in arabesque, the boredom of girls waiting for their cue. He was also deeply original as a printmaker and sculptor. His wax figures — thirty or more of dancers and horses, discovered in his studio at his death — were cast in bronze posthumously and are now recognized as some of the most important small sculptures of the 19th century. Degas grew increasingly misanthropic and antisemitic in later life — his position during the Dreyfus affair alienated many former friends — and nearly blind. He died in 1917 at eighty-three, having outlived almost everyone he had worked with. The full scale of his contribution to printmaking, sculpture, photography and pastel technique has taken most of the 20th century to properly assess.