48 Fun Facts About Edgar Degas

Besides the ballet, which sport gave Degas a favourite subject from the early 1860s onward?

Horse racing. He haunted the track at Longchamp, and a close-up of a thrown jockey at the 1866 Salon is now read as the public announcement of a change in his art.

What did Degas prefer to be called instead of an Impressionist?

A realist. He called the first group show 'a salon of Realists' and later told the painter Walter Sickert it was a pity they had ever let themselves be called Impressionists.

In which city was Degas born in 1834?

Paris. He was born just south of Montmartre and, apart from three years of study in Italy, kept his home and studio in that corner of the city for the rest of his life.

Which American city did Degas's mother come from?

New Orleans. Her Creole family had settled there from Haiti in 1810, and in 1872 her son crossed the Atlantic to spend the winter with his American uncle and brothers.

Which master told the young Degas to 'draw lines, young man, and still more lines'?

Ingres. Degas met the old master in 1855 and never forgot the advice; decades later, once he could afford to collect, he made Ingres one of the best-represented artists he owned.

What did Degas's father expect him to study after the lycée?

Law. He enrolled at the university's law faculty in 1853 but barely studied, having already turned a room at home into a studio and signed on as a copyist at the Louvre.

In which Italian city did Degas stay with his exiled uncle's household, the subject of his first masterpiece?

Florence. His uncle Gennaro, a baron, had been banned from Naples for backing the 1848 revolution, and his aunt's unhappiness in exile hangs over the group portrait Degas made of them.

Which painter is Degas said to have met while both were copying the same Velázquez in the Louvre?

Édouard Manet. The tale may be apocryphal, but the friendship and rivalry were real, and Manet's example helped pull Degas away from the past toward subjects from modern life.

During which war did Degas enlist in the National Guard and find his eyesight defective?

Franco-Prussian War. He joined up to defend the besieged capital in 1870, and it was rifle practice that exposed the weak eyes that were to worry him for the rest of his life.

Which commodity is being traded in the only Degas painting that a museum bought during his lifetime?

Cotton. He painted his uncle's office while visiting relatives in America in 1872–73 and hoped to sell the picture to a Manchester mill owner; the museum at Pau bought it instead in 1878.

The family debts that surfaced when Degas's father died in 1874 forced the painter, for the first time, to do what?

Sell his art to live. His father's affairs and his brothers' business had both run up losses, and the decade of hard work that followed produced much of his best-known painting.

In Degas's Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, how is the acrobat being hoisted to the circus roof?

By her teeth. Olga Brown, billed as Miss La La, clenched a leather mouthpiece for her 'Iron Jaw' act, and Degas went back to the circus night after night to draw her.

Which everyday materials did Degas add to his Little Dancer, startling visitors to the 1881 exhibition?

Real hair and a fabric tutu. The figure also wore a real bodice and slippers, and critics who called her ugly still admitted they had never seen sculpture so lifelike.

Marie van Goethem, the girl who posed for the Little Dancer, was one of the Opéra ballet pupils nicknamed what?

Little rats. The 'petits rats' were mostly girls from poor families like Marie, a Belgian tailor's daughter, and they danced under the eye of wealthy men who came backstage as 'protectors'.

In what material did Degas originally model the Little Dancer?

Wax. He showed the tinted figure once, in 1881, then kept it in his studio for the rest of his life; no cast was made from it until after he died.

What happened in 1873 to the rue Le Peletier opera house whose rehearsal rooms Degas loved to paint?

It burned down. Degas went on painting its rehearsal rooms from memory and imagination, as in The Dance Class of 1874, while the company waited for Garnier's new house to open.

In his later decades Degas made picture after picture of unposed women doing what?

Bathing. He drew them stepping into tubs and towelling themselves as if unobserved, and the suite of nudes he sent to the last Impressionist show in 1886 set off a storm of comment.

Alongside dancers and milliners, which working women were a favourite Degas subject from the late 1860s?

Laundresses. His best-known pair shows one woman yawning while the other leans her whole weight on the iron, yet he gives the tired workers an almost classical grandeur.

About how many works depicting dancers did Degas make over his career?

About 1,500. Yet he said his chief interest in dancers lay in 'rendering movement and painting pretty clothes'.

Who really posed as the slumped drinker in Degas's café scene L'Absinthe?

An actress friend. Ellen Andrée posed in the studio beside the engraver Marcellin Desboutin, and the picture so damaged their names that Degas had to state publicly they were not drunkards.

L'Absinthe is set in which Place Pigalle café, a haunt of painters and writers in the 1870s?

La Nouvelle Athènes. A hotbed of bohemian artists and writers, it was the real setting, yet the scene itself was staged: Degas painted it in his studio, not at a café table.

Which museum holds L'Absinthe?

Musée d'Orsay. It hangs there as In a Café; the famous title stuck only after an 1893 London showing, where critics took the picture for a sermon against drink.

In Degas's The Ballet Class, who watches from the back wall as old Jules Perrot drills the pupils?

The dancers' mothers. Degas packed the room with such backstage detail: a girl scratching her back, a small dog, and the watering can used to damp the boards so that no one slipped.

What did Degas mock his fellow Impressionists for doing?

Painting outdoors. He joked that the police should keep an eye on landscape painters and pepper them with a little bird-shot, and he worked in the studio all his life.

Which painter did Degas recruit to the Impressionist group in 1877 after admiring her work at the Salon?

Mary Cassatt. She called her first sight of his work the turning point of her artistic life, and she repaid him by steering collectors in her native America toward his pictures.

What did Degas remain, by choice, for the whole of his life?

A bachelor. Asked about marriage, he said he would have lived in misery for fear his wife might look at a finished picture and call it 'a pretty little thing'.

Which scandal brought out Degas's antisemitism and cost him his Jewish friends?

The Dreyfus Affair. By the mid-1890s he had cut off every Jewish friend, among them the playwright Ludovic Halévy after years of closeness, and he stayed in the anti-Dreyfus camp to the end.

Which dry medium did Degas master by the late 1870s, layering it in complex textures?

Pastel. It let him draw and colour in a single stroke, settling his old tug-of-war between line and colour, and by the mid-1880s most of his major works were made with it.

Which printmaking technique did Degas turn into an art of its own, making some 300 examples?

Monotype. He often worked over the printed image in colour, and he made them in two bursts, from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s and again in the early 1890s.

Which new technology did Degas take up with a passion late in his career?

Photography. He posed friends by lamplight and photographed models as reference for his drawings, though he scoffed at other novelties: of the telephone he said, 'They ring, and you run.'

Which ancient warriors did the young Degas paint as teenagers, the girls daring the boys to a contest?

Spartans. Critics have long noticed that his ancient Greeks have the snub noses and skinny frames of Montmartre street kids, forerunners of the dancers he would paint for decades.

Which instrument does Degas's friend Désiré Dihau play at the front of The Orchestra at the Opera?

The bassoon. Dihau commissioned the picture, and Degas moved his instrument to the front of the pit, where no bassoon then sat, while cutting the ballet off above so only legs and skirts show.

Before he turned to modern life, what kind of artist had the young Degas set out to become?

A history painter. He laboured for years over scenes from the Bible and antiquity, but when his medieval war scene went almost unnoticed at the 1865 Salon he never sent it another subject from the past.

Which profession gave Degas's father the means to raise five children in comfort?

Banker. Auguste knew painting well, held musical evenings at home and took his son round the museums, yet he still hoped the boy would settle on a steadier career.

Degas's tense, lamplit Interior may illustrate the wedding night in which novel by Émile Zola?

Thérèse Raquin. In the novel two lovers who have murdered her husband find their wedding night poisoned by guilt, a match argued by the scholar Theodore Reff.

In which city can you see the original Little Dancer, the one Degas modelled with his own hands?

Washington. The collector Paul Mellon bought the fragile original in 1956 and left it to the National Gallery of Art; the figures in other museums are copies made after Degas died.

Which night-time performers did Degas paint lit harshly from below by the footlights?

Cabaret singers. In works such as The Singer with the Glove he showed the glamour of the café-concert and its awkwardness at once, the stage glare striking the performer from beneath.

Degas painted two near-identical ballet classroom scenes; one hangs in France, the other in which New York museum?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its Dance Class was ordered by the opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, and a poster on the painted wall for Rossini's William Tell is a tribute to him.

What forced Degas to stop working and move to the Boulevard de Clichy in 1912?

Demolition of his home. Driven from the Montmartre house where he had lived and worked for more than twenty years, he made nothing more and took to wandering the streets, nearly blind.

At which café did Degas hold forth among the future Impressionists in the late 1860s?

Café Guerbois. He was an occasional but forceful voice at its tables, where Renoir, Monet and Pissarro also argued that painting should face the sights of the modern world.

Which state art school admitted Degas in 1855, only for him to leave for Italy the next year?

École des Beaux-Arts. He studied drawing there under Louis Lamothe but soon abandoned the course, choosing to train himself in front of the frescoes and old masters of Italy.

Which female painter did Degas buy work from early and teach soft-ground etching?

Suzanne Valadon. A former circus performer and artists' model with no formal training, she got letters from Degas, who called her 'terrible Maria', nagging her to bring him more drawings.

Which non-European art did Degas collect, influencing his compositions?

Japanese prints. Where other painters borrowed Japan's exotic imagery, Degas took the prints' cropping and lopsided viewpoints, the tricks behind his sliced-off figures and empty foregrounds.

Which word completes Degas's remark that 'no art was ever less … than mine'?

Spontaneous. 'What I do is the result of reflection and of the study of the great masters,' he went on: a painter of fleeting moments who rehearsed every one of them.

Whose 1915 joint Cassatt–Degas show in New York raised money for women's suffrage?

Cassatt savoured the irony, given Degas's views.

What loss marked Degas's boyhood when he was thirteen?

His mother's death. Célestine, who had filled the house with opera arias, left five children; Edgar was brought up by his father and a circle of unmarried uncles.

Which dealer, the Impressionists' great commercial champion, backed Degas from the 1870s?

Paul Durand-Ruel. He bought the group's pictures when few others would, came close to ruin doing it, and finally found them a market by opening up buyers across the Atlantic.

Which French caricaturist was one of the three artists Degas idolised and collected most keenly?

Honoré Daumier. Degas prized the vigour of his drawings of ordinary people at work, and Daumier's art joined that of two revered painters at the heart of his private collection.