Edgar Degas
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
48 free Edgar Degas trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Edgar Degas organised the Impressionist exhibitions and hated being called an Impressionist. He never painted outdoors, joked about shooting landscapists with bird-shot, and spent his life drawing dancers, laundresses, jockeys and bathers from memory in a Paris studio, growing blinder and more bitter every year. These 48 questions cover the life and the work: the banker father who wanted a lawyer, the Creole mother from New Orleans, Ingres's advice about lines, the Bellelli Family begun in Naples, and the brother whose debts turned a rich amateur into a professional. You will get the Little Dancer in wax with real hair, the bronze that sold for 13 million pounds, L'Absinthe's models and its London scandal, The Ballet Class and its silver-haired master, and the long friendship and falling-out with Mary Cassatt. Easy questions cover dancers, pastel and Paris; the hard tier asks about foundries, the Abadie trial, Jean-Baptiste Faure and the only painting a museum bought while he lived. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Besides the ballet, which sport gave Degas a favourite subject from the early 1860s onward?
Horse racing
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.
Q 02What did Degas prefer to be called instead of an Impressionist?
A realist
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.
Q 03In which city was Degas born in 1834?
Paris
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.
Q 04Which American city did Degas's mother come from?
New Orleans
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.
Q 05Which master told the young Degas to 'draw lines, young man, and still more lines'?
Ingres
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.
Q 06What did Degas's father expect him to study after the lycée?
Law
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.
Q 07In which Italian city did Degas stay with his exiled uncle's household, the subject of his first masterpiece?
Florence
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.
Q 08Which painter is Degas said to have met while both were copying the same Velázquez in the Louvre?
Édouard Manet
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.
Q 09During which war did Degas enlist in the National Guard and find his eyesight defective?
Franco-Prussian War
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.
Q 10Which commodity is being traded in the only Degas painting that a museum bought during his lifetime?
Cotton
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.
Q 11The 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
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.
Q 12In Degas's Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, how is the acrobat being hoisted to the circus roof?
By her teeth
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.
Q 13Which everyday materials did Degas add to his Little Dancer, startling visitors to the 1881 exhibition?
Q 21L'Absinthe is set in which Place Pigalle café, a haunt of painters and writers in the 1870s?
La Nouvelle Athènes
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.
Q 22Which museum holds L'Absinthe?
Musée d'Orsay
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.
Q 23In Degas's The Ballet Class, who watches from the back wall as old Jules Perrot drills the pupils?
The dancers' mothers
Real hair and a fabric tutu
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.
Q 14Marie van Goethem, the girl who posed for the Little Dancer, was one of the Opéra ballet pupils nicknamed what?
Little rats
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'.
Q 15In what material did Degas originally model the Little Dancer?
Wax
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.
Q 16What happened in 1873 to the rue Le Peletier opera house whose rehearsal rooms Degas loved to paint?
It burned down
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.
Q 17In his later decades Degas made picture after picture of unposed women doing what?
Bathing
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.
Q 18Alongside dancers and milliners, which working women were a favourite Degas subject from the late 1860s?
Laundresses
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.
Q 19About how many works depicting dancers did Degas make over his career?
About 1,500
About 1,500. Yet he said his chief interest in dancers lay in 'rendering movement and painting pretty clothes'.
Q 20Who really posed as the slumped drinker in Degas's café scene L'Absinthe?
An actress friend
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.
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.
Q 24What did Degas mock his fellow Impressionists for doing?
Painting outdoors
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.
Q 25Which painter did Degas recruit to the Impressionist group in 1877 after admiring her work at the Salon?
Mary Cassatt
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.
Q 26What did Degas remain, by choice, for the whole of his life?
A bachelor
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'.
Q 27Which scandal brought out Degas's antisemitism and cost him his Jewish friends?
The Dreyfus Affair
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.
Q 28Which dry medium did Degas master by the late 1870s, layering it in complex textures?
Pastel
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.
Q 29Which printmaking technique did Degas turn into an art of its own, making some 300 examples?
Monotype
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.
Q 30Which new technology did Degas take up with a passion late in his career?
Photography
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.'