Born: 19 July 1834, Paris, France Died: 27 September 1917
Degas was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term. Degas began to paint early in his life. By eighteen, he had turned a room in his home into an artist's studio, and in 1853 he registered as a copyist in the Louvre. After the war, in 1872, Degas began an extended stay in New Orleans, Louisiana. Degas returned to Paris in 1873. As his financial situation improved through sales of his own work, he collected works by artists he admired: old masters such as El Greco and such contemporaries as Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Although he worked in pastels as late as the end of 1907, he ceased working in 1912, when the impending demolition of his longtime residence on the rue Victor Massé forced a wrenching move to quarters on the boulevard de Clichy. Degas never married and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, restlessly wandering the streets of Paris before dying in 1917.
Selected Collections: Guggenheim Museum, New York City Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Louvre Museum, Paris The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Musée d'Orsay Collection Database, Paris Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Museum of Modern Art, New York City National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh National Gallery, London, UK Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany
