Degas — Selected Works

Young Spartan Girls Challenging Boys

Edgar Degas — 1855

In 1859 Edgar Degas returned to Paris following a prolonged stay in Italy, where he visited relatives in Naples and Florence and attended life classes at the Académie Française in Rome. This picture, undertaken around 1860, speaks to his ambition to realize canvases featuring scenes from the Bible, as well as ancient and more recent history. Degas took his subject from the life of Lycurgus, a legendary ninth-century b.c. Spartan lawgiver. Lycurgus’s social reforms included an unusual method of physical training in which adolescent girls competed on an equal footing with boys, exercising nude in public. Degas would have worked up this monochromatic sketch with layers of color had he completed it, but he left it unfinished when he began a second version of the subject (National Gallery of Art, London). Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Self-Portrait

Edgar Degas — 1857

In the 1850s Degas frequently used himself as a model, but he made only one printed self-portrait. Through successive stages of biting the plate and layers of crosshatching, Degas gradually built areas of dark tone. In this impression, Degas added etched lines on the face, hat, and coat and carefully wiped his copper plate to create atmospheric effects. His clearly drawn eyes directly engage the viewer, resulting in a psychologically powerful and intense portrait of the young artist at age 23. This impression was dedicated to his friend, the painter and sculptor Paul Albert Bartholomé.

Collection: The Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0 · Source image ↗

Portrait of Mme Lisle and Mme Loubens

Edgar Degas — 1862

Edgar Degas rarely accepted portrait commissions; his sitters were almost always family members or people within his social circle. The two women in this somber, unfinished painting were identified through preparatory drawings that label them as “Mme Lisle” (left) and “Mme Loubens” (right). Both were friends of artist Édouard Manet’s family; they likely met Degas at a gathering at Manet’s home. In an 1869 letter, artist Berthe Morisot lamented that Degas had abandoned her at one such soirée for the company of Madame Lisle and Madame Loubens, attesting to the group’s closeness. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Stefanina Primicile Carafa, Marchioness of Cicerale and Duchess of Montejasi

Edgar Degas — 1870

Although best remembered for his depictions of ballet dancers and race horses, Degas painted many likenesses of his family members. He probably painted this portrait of his aunt, Stefania Carafa (1819–1901), during an extended visit to Naples, where many of his relatives lived. Described in family papers as a highly indulged, fun-loving child, the duchess grew into the stoic, world-weary woman depicted here. No expensive finery reveals her high social rank; indeed she wears a mourning dress, possibly to observe the recent death of her brother Achille.

Collection: The Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0 · Source image ↗

Yellow Dancers (In the Wings)

Edgar Degas — 1874

Edgar Degas first painted dancers as an independent subject in 1871. He was to devote almost half his output as an artist to this subject, observing countless performances and rehearsals at the Paris Opéra. Here he placed the viewer in the wings, as if among the elite Opéra subscribers who roamed and socialized backstage. Dance subjects allowed Degas to contemporize his lifelong interest in showing the human body in complex movement, shifting the scene from ancient history to modern Paris. He finished and signed the present canvas in time for the second Impressionist exhibition, in April 1876. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

Collection: The Art Institute of Chicago · CC0 · Source image ↗

Henri Degas and His Niece Lucie Degas (The Artist's Uncle and Cousin)

Edgar Degas — 1875

Edgar Degas seldom accepted commissions. His portrait subjects were usually close friends and family members—especially those from the Italian side of his family in Florence and Naples, where he frequently visited. He most likely painted this double portrait in 1875 during a four-month stay in Naples. It depicts his orphaned first cousin, Lucie, and their uncle Henri, in whose care the girl had recently been placed. In this painting, Degas showed two people, separated by many years in age, tentatively accepting the circumstances of their new relationship. Having recently lost his own father, the artist addressed subjects such as this with candor and sensitivity. Areas of thin paint and unresolved details suggest that the work was never completed. Nonetheless, the spare treatment of the background eff ectively emphasizes the fi gures’ heads and upper bodies. Degas expressed their connection through the similar tilt of their heads and their black mourning clothes. At the same time, the edge of a French door in the background and the back of Henri’s chair divide the characters into separate sections of the canvas, creating a subtle allusion to their psychological discomfort. At once intimate and distant, casual and guarded, the portrait expresses the fragility and necessity of family ties, not only between the two people depicted but also with the third relative who painted them from the other side of the paper-laden table. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

Collection: The Art Institute of Chicago · CC0 · Source image ↗

On the Stage

Edgar Degas — 1876

Edgar Degas depicts seven dancers performing in a ballet. The gestures of the women’s raised arms and feet capture the actions, forms, and poses of the corps de ballet (the ensemble, or chorus, of a ballet company that performs in groups). To heighten the sense of motion and spectacle, Degas smudged the edges of the forms where the dancers’ dresses meet the stage. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Ballet at the Paris Opéra

Edgar Degas — 1877

One of the nineteenth century’s most innovative artists, Edgar Degas often combined traditional techniques in unorthodox ways. In Ballet at the Paris Opéra , the artist creatively joined the monotype technique, rarely used in his time, with the fragile medium of pastel. Described as “the powder of butterfly wings,” pastel was the perfect medium to illustrate the onstage metamorphosis of spindly young dancers into visions of beauty as perfect and short-lived as butterflies. This work, executed on one of the widest monotype plates ever used by the artist, bears Degas’s characteristically cropped forms and odd vantage points, which effectively convey the immediacy of the scene. The view is from the orchestra pit, with the necks of the double basses intruding into the dancers’ zone. The central dancer is in fifth position, en pointe , but the random placement of the corps de ballet, with the dancers’ free-flowing hair, suggests a rehearsal rather than a performance. The Paris Opéra was the official school of the first state-supported ballet, the Académie Royale de Danse, created in 1661. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

Collection: The Art Institute of Chicago · CC0 · Source image ↗

The Millinery Shop

Edgar Degas — 1879

The Millinery Shop is the largest of Edgar Degas’s paintings focused on milliners, or hatmakers. He arranged the composition carefully, making multiple drawings and pastels of the lone figure, perfecting the woman’s pose and experimenting with her outfit. The final composition highlights the visual ambiguities of class identity that arose in France in the late nineteenth century. The woman sits in a hat shop examining a wide-brimmed hat. She wears a fashionable green wool dress with long, elegant gloves that were just as likely to be worn by wealthy clients as by the employees of the shop. At the time, millinery work was considered a prestigious trade that required skill and taste, incrementally elevating the young women who succeeded in the business. Degas addressed this subtle shift in the class hierarchy through the subject’s fashion: While her dress is nice enough to be worn by an affluent woman, she does not wear a hat of her own, which would have been expected of a high-class young lady. The artist portrayed this newfound uncertainty playfully by positioning the hat with green trimmings so it seems to sit atop the woman’s head. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Portrait after a Costume Ball (Portrait of Madame Dietz-Monnin)

Edgar Degas — 1879

This is one of thirty-five works that comprise the Winterbotham Collection. Click here to learn more about the collection. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

Collection: The Art Institute of Chicago · CC0 · Source image ↗

The Star

Edgar Degas — 1879

The prima ballerina shown in Edgar Degas’s pastel has been identified as the Spanish dancer Rosita Mauri, who moved from Catalonia to Paris and gained fame at the Paris Opéra in the late 1870s. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

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Three Studies of a Dancer in Fourth Position

Edgar Degas — 1879

Made in preparation for the sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen , this remarkable drawing depicts the model Marie van Goethem from three different perspectives: left profile, right profile, and facing the viewer. Edgar Degas wanted to understand the figure in the round, in two dimensions, before he approached the sculpture in three dimensions. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

Collection: The Art Institute of Chicago · CC0 · Source image ↗

Estérel Village

Edgar Degas — 1885

This landscape is one of many monotypes that Edgar Degas produced throughout his career. The work belongs to a series Degas made while visiting a friend in the French countryside. Its blurriness resembles the view he saw out the window of trains and carriages during his travels. To translate the effects of weather and the natural terrain, he created layers of color and texture that border on abstraction in the final composition.

Collection: The Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0 · Source image ↗

Frieze of Dancers

Edgar Degas — 1890

This painting may depict a single dancer seen from four different viewpoints. The young woman is placed in an undefined setting, surrounded by mere wisps of color, applied so spontaneously that the paint ran and dripped. Degas even added the circles in the foreground with his thumb. Such audacity, while acceptable in a small sketch, must have shocked the artist's contemporaries when presented on a six-foot canvas. Equally radical is the idea of combining multiple views of a single figure. Degas's unusual presentation may have been inspired by the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904)

Collection: The Cleveland Museum of Art · CC0 · Source image ↗

Two Dancers

Edgar Degas — 1893

Edgar Degas recorded ballet dancers at rest and in motion in a variety of media, producing numerous drawings, paintings, prints, and sculptures. The subject enabled Degas to study the movement of the human form and the contortions of the body. In this pastel, the performers wait behind the curtains, in the wings of the stage, and bend at the waist, arms akimbo, in preparation for their next appearance. Text: Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0

Collection: The Art Institute of Chicago · CC0 · Source image ↗