Edgar Degas (1834-1917) French, Offset Lithograph. Signed in lower left. 
Depicts a dancer sitting with their back to the viewer. Hair up in a low bun.  Overall Size: 27 1/4 x 20 1/4 in. 

Sight Size: 21 1/8 x 14 7/8 in. 

#1110 

Edgar Degas was born on July 10, 1834 in Paris, France. His mother was born in New Orleans, and Edgar and his four siblings were raised in the comfort of a well-to-do family.  His father was a banker and often took Edgar to museums, sparking an early appreciation for art. When he graduated from the Lycee Louis le Grand in 1852, winning first prize in drawing, a friend of his father’s took him to the studio of Ingres, who was seventy-five at the time, and this meeting led him to enter the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1855. From 1856 through 1857 he made a study of Quattrocento painting while in Rome, Naples and Florence. Degas soon lost interest in historical subjects and his focus shifted to the world of theater and dance. These, together with scenes of the racecourse, were to become his favorite subjects. He took an active role in the first Impressionist show of 1874, but eventually disavowed them entirely. Throughout the end of the century he developed a (mutually shared) admiration of Mary Cassatt, who became his lifelong companion although neither ever married and they had several fallings out over politics and Degas’ misogynistic worldview. Degas began to have serious eye problems in his early thirties, including a hypersensitivity to light that compelled him to wear dark glasses. His vision later deteriorated to the point of all sight leaving his left eye, though he continued to work until his late seventies. Degas’ unique sense of composition comes from many sources: the drawings of Giovanni Bellini which he had seen and studied in Italy, the Japanese woodcuts which he enjoyed and collected, and the new art of photography. Stubborn, aristocratic, solitary and bitter, he was simultaneously feared and beloved for his biting sarcasm. He died in Paris on September 27, 1917.