Realism and Impressionism

Degas’s transition to modern subject matter, evident in Scene from the Steeplechase, was a long and gradual one, not an overnight conversion. Before he left Italy, he had made drawings of street characters and paintings of fashionable horse-riders but always on a small scale. In Paris in the early 1860s, his pictures of French racing events broke new ground both for their decidedly contemporary subject matter and for their surprising viewpoints and bold colors, which preceded the canvases of similar scenes by his renowned contemporary Édouard Manet. Degas’s portraits, too, at this time became less remote and more actively engaged with the top-hatted, restless world in which he lived. When he met Manet about 1862, Degas developed an affectionate but pointed rivalry with the slightly older man and soon shared something of Manet’s oppositional stance toward the artistic establishment and its traditional subject matter. Degas’s notebooks from these years teem with contrary possibilities for the direction of his art, as sketches of the countryside follow glimpses of theatrical performances, and studies from objects in the Louvre are interspersed among topical caricatures. After mid-decade he abandoned historical themes, sending a portrait of a current ballet star at the Paris Opéra, Eugénie Fiocre, to the Salon of 1868; he would soon reject such official exhibitions altogether.

By 1870 Degas was a familiar figure in independent art circles in Paris, at home with Realists such as James Tissot and Henri Fantin-Latour, acquainted with the vanguard critics Edmond Duranty and Champfleury, and involved as an occasional but forceful presence at the Café Guérbois, where avant-garde artists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Claude Monet would also meet. He was famously opinionated, supporting these radical artists’ shared belief that painting should engage with the sights and subjects of the modern world. As part of his own process of engaging with modernity, he self-consciously aligned himself with Realist novelists such as Émile Zola and Edmond and Jules Goncourt, drafting illustrations for their novels and briefly adopting a similar social descriptiveness.

Like most of the future Impressionists, Degas lightened his palette and adopted more abrupt, simplified compositions during this period, partly under the influence of Japanese prints, which were very popular among contemporary artists. But, unlike his colleagues, who were experimenting with painting en plein-air, Degas affected disdain toward the improvised outdoor landscape studies for which many of the Impressionists became known. Although he clung to the habit of drawing in preparation for his pictures and insisted on working in the studio rather than outdoors, in 1869 Degas did experiment in private with a series of pastel landscapes executed on the Normandy coast. While he is not generally associated with them, he turned to other rural subjects on several occasions in later life. Degas’s advancing self-confidence at this date, boosted by the first signs of public recognition, is palpable in his letters and the range of his technical accomplishment.

Early ballet paintings

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The early 1870s were critical in defining Degas’s personal and artistic trajectory, as they were for the other artists who would become known as the Impressionists. Between 1870 and 1874 he painted a pioneering group of ballet rehearsal and performance scenes, such as his The Ballet Class of 1873–76, finding eager buyers for many of them and soon becoming identified with their theme. The dance allowed Degas to test his skills in a daring new context: the world of the Paris Opéra was surrounded by sexual intrigue as well as high glamor and had previously been the province of popular illustrators. Degas built on his knowledge of past art, but he cleverly directed it at audiences of his own day in his choice of subject matter; his views of backstage activity are conspicuously casual and occasionally scurrilous. In 1874 he was one of the leading organizers of the first Impressionist exhibition (which he called “a salon of Realists”), showing his signature repertoire of dancers, horse races, and women ironing.

Impressionist exhibitions

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The pictures Degas showed at the series of eight Impressionist exhibitions, held between 1874 and 1886, revealed him at his most inventive. Whereas the paintings of Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir were largely concerned with the landscape or with figures of rural toil and urban glamor, Degas specialized in startling and enigmatic scenes of Parisian life. Visitors were frequently disconcerted by his images of popular entertainment or back-street squalor, depicted with a sharp eye for the topical gesture and heightened by a radical use of perspective, which embodied the extreme viewpoints of a newly mobile society. Already famed for his dry humor, Degas seemed to tease his viewers by opting for ambiguity, revealing a glamorous nightclub singer in all her awkwardness, while elevating a tired laundress to near-Classical grandeur. Degas was seen as the leader of a more traditionally skilled faction within the group, and his pictures were sought out by collectors. Critics approvingly pointed out that his work was grounded in a knowledge of the Old Masters and a firm line, qualities they found lacking in some of Degas’s peers.

A versatile technician

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For much of his long working life, Degas was attracted to the pleasures and difficulties of the artist’s materials. His drawings include examples in pen, ink, pencil, chalk, pastel, charcoal, and oil on paper, often in combination with each other, while his paintings were carried out in watercolor, gouache, distemper (a type of paint made up of pigments bound by animal glue or casein), metallic pigments, and oils, on surfaces including card, silk, ceramic, tile, and wood panel, as well as widely varied textures of canvas. There was something contradictory about much of this activity: Degas invoked the techniques of the Old Masters while creating anarchic methods of his own. He effectively developed the black-and-white monotype as an independent medium, for example, sometimes with an added layer of pastel or gouache, as in Dancer with a Bouquet Bowing Onstage (1878). The results can be exhilarating, notably when the effects of light and texture are subtly expressive of the chosen subject, but he soon tired of the technique. The late 1870s marked the height of Degas’s graphic experimentation, after which he moved away from printmaking to concentrate on enriching his use of pastel. Between 1890 and 1892 he briefly returned to monotype, perfecting a new color procedure in a dazzling series of landscapes, many—like Wheat Field and Green Hill—with pastel embellishments.

By the early 1880s the variety of Degas’s exhibited art seemed endless, encompassing portraits and theater scenes, pastels of women at their toilette and of notorious criminals, and series of drawings and prints. During this period Degas began to experiment with making pictures as charcoal drawings on tracing paper and retracing them several times before adding pastel to produce a “family” of related compositions, analogous to the series paintings of Monet. Such sequences were deeply challenging artistic exercises, allowing him to move beyond subject matter and to manipulate the finest nuance of gesture or detail, while seeming to elevate the fundamentals of picture-making—color, form, and composition—to a newly independent level. For some years Degas had also been quietly exploring the medium of sculpture, using wax and other materials to make modest statuettes of horses and a group of figures that culminated in the tantalizingly lifelike wax sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1878–81). Shown at the Impressionist exhibition of 1881, this work carried the possibilities of visual realism to new extremes by incorporating an actual reduced-scale tutu, ballet slippers, a human-hair wig, and a silk ribbon.