Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas was a French painter and a founding organizer of the Impressionist exhibitions, participating in seven of the eight group shows held between 1874 and 1886, yet he never fully accepted the label, preferring to call himself a Realist or Independent; he is recorded as saying that no art was ever less spontaneous than his own, the result of reflection and study of the old masters. Unlike Monet or Pissarro, he showed little interest in plein-air landscape and instead worked mostly from memory, photographs and models in the studio, specializing in ballet dancers, milliners, laundresses and racehorses, rendered in unusual, often cropped compositions influenced by photography and Japanese prints. He was one of the era's most versatile technicians, working across oil, pastel, etching, lithography, monotype and sculpture, and is regarded as a bridge between the academic tradition he trained in and early twentieth century modernism.