Degas Was Not Your Typical Impressionist

For one thing he disliked open air landscape painting, saying that an open season should be declared on artists littering the countryside with paint boxes and easels. I’m sure he did not want his Impressionist friends peppered with lead buckshot, it was just his belligerent way of saying that art is not about dashing off quick impressions before the light changes.

Degas was a classical studio artist. That is, an artist that liked to plan a painting slowly and carefully, with preliminary figure studies, compositional layouts and the like.

“My paintings are not the product spontaneous sensations,” Degas asserted in one interview, “They are as cunningly planned as a crime.”

So, if he was not a fan of Monet, Pissarro and Sisley, all basically outdoor landscape specialists... who were his heroes?

The great classical painter, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was a big influence on the young Degas and his early work shows a preference for Neo Classical subject matter...

‘Spartan Girls Teasing Boys.’ In the National Gallery, London, Is probably Degas’s best painting from his classical period. However, the adolescent figures have that firm Degas line and he makes no attempt to polish the canvas to death in an attempt to replicate the camera lens, the laborious practice of most Neo Classical painters in the 1800s. One critic described Neo Classical detail as, ‘A mountain of work for a mole hill of result.’

Manet was another huge influence on Degas, He was also the bad tempered, reclusive artist’s best friend. Both men had wealthy parents who could afford to fund their sons artistic experiments, so money was not an issue for them.

Manet convinced Degas that modern life was the perfect subject for a modern artist, that a contemporary dance class could be just as exiting as an ancient slave market. A parisian washer woman just as worthy of his art as some Roman slave girl in a bath house.

When we look at a Degas now, it is hard to see what his contemporaries found so shocking about his glowing pastils and rich oil paintings. Maybe we are looking at Degas’s work from the perspective of the 21st Century, with all that has passed for modern art since Degas’s era.