Edgar Degas - Research Paper Example

He had come from a family that was extremely musical: his mother was an opera singer, though not a professional one, while his father Auguste used to arrange recitals to be performed by musicians in their home. Degas mother passed away when he was just thirteen years old; after that, both his father and grandfather had a great influence in his life (Edgardegas.net, 2010). He studied at the Lycee Loius le Grand whereby he attained a baccalaureat in literature in the year 1853. Degas began his life as a painter when he was still a teenager of eighteen years old; he had changed his room to be an artist’s studio and after graduating registered as a Louvre copist.

Auguste however was not for the idea of his son becoming a painter, and he urged him to enroll in law school. In November 1853, Degas reluctantly went to study law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris; however, he was not so enthusiastic about it. When he was still a copist, he produced a number of copies of Raphel that were quite impressive; working on them, he studied other works done by contemporary painters with examples of Delacroix and Ingres (Edgardegas.net, 2010). In the year 1855 he was admitted into the Ecole Des Beaux-Art School in Paris, but after studying there only on year, he left school so that he could take three years traveling, studying and painting in Italy.

There he painted painstaking copies of Michelangelo’s work, a renowned Italian Renaissance painter, as well as Da Vinci. He developed a classical linearity reverence that was a distinguishing characteristic even of the modern paintings he had done (Edgardegas.net, 2010). According to Growe, (2001), in 1859 Degas went back to Paris and made a name as a painter. He took the traditional approach whereby he painted large portraits mostly belonging to family members and big historical scenes with examples of Semiramis Building Babylon, the daughter of Jephtha and the Scene of middle Age war.

He then went to submit his works to a group of French teachers and artists who would be in charge of exhibitions that happened in public. The group had extremely conventional and rigid ideas of proper artistic form and beauty; therefore, it was indifferent to Degas paintings. In 1862, Degas had a chance of meeting Edouard Manet, a fellow painter at the Louvre, and the two developed a friendly rivalry within no time. In 1868 Degas was one of the important members of the avant-garde artists group that included Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley.

They used to meet regularly as the Cafe Guerbois so as to discuss ways that artists could use to interact with the modern world. The Franco-Prussian war began in July 1870, and Degas decided to volunteer to be part of the French National Guard. As the war was ending in 1871, the Paris Commune took control of the capital for approximately two months previous to Adolphe Thiers went ahead to establish again the Third Republic at the time of a bloody civil war. In order to avoid the Paris Commune tumult, Degas took a long trip in New Orleans to visit his relatives (Growe, 2001).

Degas came back to Paris in 1873, and here he met with Sisley, Monet and a few other painters. They went ahead to form the Societe Anonyme des Artistes which was a group that was obligated to have exhibitions which were not under the Salon’s control. The group would later come to be identified as the Impressionists despite the fact that Degas fancied the name “