Edgar Degas - ballet dancers, Impressionism, and master of pastels
Edgar Degas was the French artist who, more than anyone else, turned the world of ballet into art, and his subjects are now among the most sought-after when Swedish homes are looking for a poster with movement, light, and timeless elegance. Behind the shimmering tulle skirts and floating dance steps was a strict, mathematically minded draughtsman who preferred to call himself a realist rather than an Impressionist. Degas did not capture the beautiful moment on stage, but the second before or after: the dancer yawning, tying her shoelace, or resting against a stage flat. That honesty is precisely what makes his art as vibrant today as when it was painted in the 1870s.
This fact page is an in-depth guide to Edgar Degas's life, techniques, and most important works - from his famous ballet pastels and the sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen to his groundbreaking work with monotype. You will find a complete timeline, an overview of his artistic signature, and practical advice on how to incorporate a Degas poster into your home's interior. The goal is for this to be the best Swedish-language resource about the artist, fact-based and useful whether you are interested in art or looking for the right painting for your wall.
Contents
↓ What is Edgar Degas known for?
↓ Edgar Degas's life and background
↓ Degas's most famous works
↓ Technique, style, and artistic signature
↓ Cultural influence and legacy
↓ Degas at home - an interior design guide
↓ Timeline of Degas's life
↓ Related artists
↓ Frequently asked questions about Edgar Degas
What is Edgar Degas known for?
Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was a French painter, sculptor, and printmaker who is considered one of the founders of Impressionism, but who himself rejected the label and preferred to call himself a realist. He is best known for his depictions of ballet dancers at the Paris Opera - a subject he returned to in an estimated 1,500 works over the course of his career. Unlike many Impressionists, Degas almost never painted outdoors; he was a studio artist who built his compositions from memory, sketches, and an almost obsessive study of the body in motion.
Degas worked in an unusually wide range of techniques: oil, pastel, gouache, etching, lithography, monotype, photography, and wax sculpture. His most famous three-dimensional work, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, caused a scandal when it was shown at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881. Today, Degas is among the most highly valued artists on the auction market, and Sweden's Nationalmuseum in Stockholm also owns works by him.
Quick facts: Born July 19, 1834, in Paris, France. Died September 27, 1917, in Paris, aged 83. Nationality: French. Movement: Impressionism (co-founder; participated in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions). Signature subjects: ballet dancers, approximately 1,500 works about ballet, as well as racehorses and bathing women. Auction record: the sculpture Petite danseuse de quatorze ans sold for $41.6 million at Christie’s in New York in 2022. Record for a work on paper/canvas: Danseuse au repos, $37 million at Sotheby’s in 2008. Represented at, among others, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.
Edgar Degas’s life and background
Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas was born on July 19, 1834, in Paris, the eldest of five children. His father, Augustin De Gas, was a banker of Italian descent, and his mother, Célestine Musson, came from a French Creole family in New Orleans, Louisiana. The family was well-off, and the young Edgar received a classical education. After completing his secondary education, he began studying law in 1853 at his father’s wish, but soon abandoned it for art.
A decisive encounter was his acquaintance with the elderly Neoclassicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who is said to have given the young Degas the advice: draw lines, many lines. In 1855, he was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and in the following years he spent long periods in Italy, where he studied the masters of the Renaissance and drew countless copies. This deeply rooted drawing tradition set him apart throughout his life from the purely coloristic Impressionists.
In 1872-1873, Degas made an extended journey to New Orleans in the United States, where relatives on his mother’s side were involved in the cotton trade. There he painted Portraits dans un bureau (Nouvelle-Orléans), a group portrait from the family’s cotton office that now hangs at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Pau, France. It was the first work by an Impressionist to be acquired by a museum, as early as 1878, and it shows how early Degas began depicting modern working life with the same objective gaze he later directed toward ballet. After returning home, the family’s finances suffered setbacks, and Degas was forced to support himself entirely through his painting for the first time.
From history painting to modern Paris
During the 1860s, Degas initially painted historical subjects and portraits in an academic style. The turning point came when he turned his attention to contemporary urban life: cafés, theaters, cabarets, circuses, and racetracks. His friendship with Édouard Manet became significant, and Degas was drawn into the circle of young artists who organized the first independent exhibition in 1874 at the photographer Nadar’s studio - the event that gave Impressionism its name.
Failing eyesight and the later years
As early as his forties, Degas's eyesight began to fail, a problem that worsened throughout his life and partly explains his transition from detailed oil painting to the coarser, more tactile pastel. He remained unmarried, became increasingly withdrawn over the years, and socialized within a narrow circle. In his final years, nearly blind, he could barely work. Edgar Degas died on September 27, 1917, in Paris, in the midst of the First World War, and was buried in Montmartre Cemetery.
A Collector and an Enigmatic Person
Alongside his own artistic work, Degas was a passionate art collector. He acquired works by, among others, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, and El Greco, and at times dreamed of having his own museum. As a person, he was known for his sharp tongue and need for seclusion, and he kept a certain distance even from his closest artist colleagues. This combination of stern seriousness, technical perfectionism, and a never-ending curiosity about new materials shaped his entire career and makes him one of the most complex figures in art history.
Degas's most famous works
Degas's output is enormous and spans painting, pastel, graphic art, and sculpture. Some works have become iconic and constantly reappear as posters and reproductions. Below are the most significant, together with the context that makes them more than beautiful pictures.
The Ballet Class (La classe de danse)
Painted around 1873–1876 and now at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, The Ballet Class shows a rehearsal room where the famous ballet master Jules Perrot directs a group of young dancers. The composition is typical of Degas: the central action is shifted to one side, the floor slopes steeply, and the eye is led diagonally through the room. Here, dance is not glamour but work – the girls scratch themselves, adjust their ribbons, and wait their turn. Degas painted several versions of the subject, and this particular one is among his most studied works. The small watering can and the spiral staircase glimpsed in the background are carefully observed details from the Paris Opera's rehearsal rooms, to which the artist gained access thanks to his contacts among the opera's musicians and subscribers.
L'Étoile (The Star)
The pastel L'Étoile from 1879, also called Danseuse sur la scène, is one of Degas's most reproduced images. A prima ballerina is captured in a triumphant pirouette beneath the spotlight, while a dark male figure can be glimpsed in the wings behind her. The seemingly beautiful scene carries a darker undertone about the reality of ballet, where wealthy subscribers had access backstage. The work is housed at the Musée d'Orsay. The composition is a textbook example of Degas's bold perspective: we see the dancer from above, from a box, and the empty floor occupies most of the image while the figure balances at the far edge of one corner. The airy, almost floating effect is reinforced by the pastel's light tones against the dark background.
The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer
The sculpture Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, modeled in wax around 1880 and fitted with a real tulle skirt and hair ribbon, shocked audiences at the sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881. Critics found the realism provocative - the model, the young student Marie van Goethem, was portrayed without idealization. After Degas’s death, the figure was cast in bronze in around twenty copies. One such bronze cast set an auction record for the artist in 2022 when it sold for $41.6 million at Christie’s in New York. The original wax figure, with its real tulle skirt, is now housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and is considered one of the most groundbreaking sculptures of the 19th century. Degas’s choice to combine modeled wax with real textiles was a radical blend of art and reality that anticipated the 20th century’s experiments with materials and objects in sculpture.
The Absinthe Drinker and the Bathing Women
Outside ballet, Degas depicted the darker side of the metropolis. L'Absinthe (1875-1876) shows a gloomy couple in a Paris café and became controversial for its unvarnished realism. From the 1880s onward, he increasingly devoted himself to his series of bathing women - intimate pastel studies of women washing and drying themselves, seen as if through a keyhole. One of these, Woman Drying Herself, is part of the Nationalmuseum collection in Stockholm. In these bathing scenes, Degas sought not classical beauty but the everyday truth of a body captured without posing. He himself described how he wanted to show people as if they were being observed through a keyhole, unaware that they were being watched. Today, the series is considered one of his most influential and points toward the more stripped-down depictions of people in the 20th century.
The Racehorses
Alongside ballet, the racetrack was Degas’s other great arena for studying movement. From the late 1860s onward, he painted jockeys and thoroughbreds in the moment of tense anticipation before the start, rather than the race itself. Works such as Racehorses in Front of the Stands (around 1866-1868) at the Musée d'Orsay show how he transferred his interest in the mechanics of the body from humans to animals. When the photographer Eadweard Muybridge published his famous series of images of galloping horses in the 1880s, Degas studied them closely and adjusted his own depictions of horses’ leg positions in accordance with scientific findings.
"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." - Edgar Degas
Technique, Style, and Artistic Signature
What unites Degas's seemingly different subjects is an unwavering focus on composition and movement. He was an experimental technician who constantly crossed the boundaries between media, and several of his approaches anticipated 20th-century art and even the visual language of film.
Master of Pastel
As his eyesight deteriorated, pastel became Degas's primary medium. He built up images in layers, fixed them, and added new layers on top, creating a unique texture and a luminosity of color that oil rarely achieves. By working with semi-transparent paper and repeated sketches, he could refine the same pose again and again. The matte, powdery surface of pastels is an important reason why the works reproduce so beautifully in print. Degas pushed pastel technique further than any contemporary artist and sometimes combined it with gouache, tempera, and even steam to dissolve the chalk into a paste-like mass. He also sprinkled metallic pigment over the surface to capture the sparkle of the stage lights against the tulle skirts. This inventiveness makes his later works shimmer with a color intensity and sense of material unmatched in 19th-century art.
The Pioneer of Monotype
Degas was one of the 19th century's boldest explorers of monotype - a technique in which the artist paints with printing ink on a smooth plate and then makes a single unique impression. He created more than 300 monotypes, often as a basis for pastels, and used the technique for everything from landscapes to bold scenes of Parisian nightlife. This experimental work makes him a pioneer of modern printmaking.
Cropping, Diagonals, and Japanese Influence
Degas's compositions deliberately break with the rules of the academy. Figures are cut off at the edge of the image, the center is left empty, and the eye is led into the picture along steep diagonals. The inspiration came partly from photography's snapshot, and partly from the Japanese woodblock prints that streamed into Paris during the 1860s and 1870s. The result is a set of compositions that feel caught in passing, as if the viewer had just stepped into the room.
Degas was also an early photographer and experimented with the camera during the 1890s, further sharpening his sense of unexpected crops and dramatic lighting. He staged portraits of friends in shadowy interiors and let the light fall from unexpected directions. This interplay between brush and lens is one reason his images still feel so modern today - they anticipated the cinematic visual language that would come to define the 20th century.
Cultural Influence and Legacy
Edgar Degas stands as a bridge between the academic tradition and modern art. His way of cropping the image and observing people in an unglamorous moment paved the way for artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and later Pablo Picasso, who deeply admired him. The aesthetics of photography and film, with their quick cuts and surprising angles, have many points of contact with Degas's visual language.
Degas also left his mark in the Nordic countries. The young Swedish and Nordic artists who traveled to Paris during the 1880s were influenced by the Impressionists' new way of seeing, and several of them brought home influences that shaped the modern breakthrough in Scandinavian painting. The fact that the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm now owns works by Degas, and that the museum has included him in exhibitions about Impressionism and coastal painting, shows how well he fits into a Nordic art narrative centered on light and everyday subjects. For Swedish viewers, his combination of technical precision and quiet everyday poetry is easy to recognize and appreciate.
His legacy lives on in museum collections and exhibitions around the world. The Musée d'Orsay in Paris houses the core of his ballet motifs, while bronze casts of The Little Dancer are spread across major museums. The continued interest is demonstrated by the many current exhibitions: at the Glyptotek in Copenhagen, a full exhibition, Degas' Obsession, is running in 2025–2026, built around a single ballet painting, while the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm highlighted Degas's coastal motifs in the exhibition To the Sea!. For Swedish audiences, Copenhagen is a nearby destination for anyone who wants to see Degas's works in person.
The fact that Degas is now one of the most expensive names on the auction market says something about how sought-after his art has become. When the contents of his studio were sold after his death in 1918, an enormous number of works that he had never shown publicly were revealed, including the wax sculptures that were later cast in bronze. The posthumous sale spread his art into collections around the world and contributed to the standing he has today. The record of $41.6 million for a bronze cast of the Little Dancer sculpture in 2022, along with the $37 million that a pastel fetched as early as 2008, attests to an unbroken interest more than a century after his death.
Degas at Home - An Interior Design Guide
Few artists work as well on the wall as Degas. The muted palette of his ballet motifs - powder, green, ochre, and black - complements both light and dark walls, while the movement in the images adds life without becoming intrusive. A Degas poster serves as a classic foundation for an interior and never goes out of style. In the bedroom, the pastels of the bathing women create a calm, intimate feeling, while the ballet dancers bring elegance to the hallway and living room.
Consider the light when placing a Degas reproduction. The soft surfaces of pastels are best appreciated in subdued, indirect daylight that brings out the depth of the color without washing it out. A ballet pastel above a sideboard or sofa creates a natural focal point, while the diagonal movement of the motif guides the eye through the room. The color palette of powder, green, and ochre harmonizes particularly well with natural materials such as linen, oak, and rattan, making Degas a welcome companion in a Scandinavian-inspired interior where calm and light take center stage.
If you want to create a cohesive whole, Degas works beautifully alongside other French masters in a gallery wall composition. Feel free to combine a ballet pastel with an Impressionist landscape for contrast between figure and nature. In our collection of famous artists, you will find classic motifs, while our minimalist posters suit a more pared-back style. If you are looking for a cohesive look with a considered expression, the Maison collection and our chic posters can provide inspiration.
Tip: Choose a warm wood or brass frame for Degas's ballet pastels - it picks up the ochre and golden tones in the image and enhances the soft pastel feel. An off-white mat gives the motif breathing room and highlights the movement. Read more in our guide to choosing the right frame for the right poster.
Also consider the placement. A single, larger ballet pastel works best on a quiet wall where it can make an undisturbed impression, while several smaller motifs can be grouped to create rhythm. For practical advice on composition, see our gallery wall guide, and for how to choose artwork based on the room's character, see our article on choosing the right art for your home.
Timeline of Degas's life
1834 – Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas is born on July 19 in Paris, the eldest of five children in a prosperous banking family.
1853 – Begins studying law, but soon abandons it to devote himself to art.
1855 – Is admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and meets the aging Ingres, who urges him to draw lines.
1856–1859 – Travels in Italy and studies the Renaissance masters, laying the foundation for his strong drawing tradition.
1865 – Exhibits history paintings at the official Salon before turning toward modern urban life.
1874 – Takes part in the first Impressionist exhibition at Nadar's studio in Paris.
1876 – Paints L'Absinthe, an unvarnished depiction of loneliness in the big city.
1879 – Creates the pastel L'Étoile (The Star), one of his best-known ballet paintings.
1881 – Shows the sculpture The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer at the sixth Impressionist exhibition, causing a scandal.
1886 – Takes part in the final Impressionist exhibition and shows a series of pastels of bathing women.
1917 – Edgar Degas dies on September 27 in Paris, almost blind, and is buried in Montmartre Cemetery.
Related artists
Degas moved in the heart of Impressionist Paris and shared exhibitions and ideas with the era's greatest names. To understand his place in art history, it is valuable to read about his contemporaries and successors. His friend and colleague Claude Monet represented the bright, outdoor-painting side of the movement that Degas himself rejected. The sensual, joyful counterpart within the same movement is Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose dancing couples in Montmartre stand in beautiful contrast to Degas's dancers backstage, while the broader context is described in our overview of Impressionism.
Among those who built on Degas's innovative visual language were Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whose depictions of Paris nightlife clearly owed him a debt of gratitude, and Paul Cézanne, who, like Degas, sought a firmer structure beyond the fleeting moment. You can find a comprehensive introduction to all our artist portraits and art movements in our Knowledge Base.
Frequently asked questions about Edgar Degas
Would you like to give your home a French classic with movement and elegance? Edgar Degas combined a master's draughtsmanship with a modern eye for everyday moments, and that blend makes his art just as relevant today as it was 150 years ago. Explore ballet and art motifs in our collection of famous artists and find a poster that carries forward Edgar Degas's timeless eye for the beauty of fleeting moments.