Edgar Degas

Degas built a body of work obsessed with the human figure in motion: ballet dancers at the barre and on stage, racehorses and jockeys, bathers, milliners, laundresses, and the social spaces of modern Paris. More than half of his works depict dancers. He worked across oil, pastel, bronze, monotype, etching, lithography, and photography, and is widely regarded as one of the finest draftsmen of his century.

Born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas in Paris in 1834 into a banking family, he graduated from the Lycee Louis-le-Grand with a baccalaureat in literature in 1853, briefly enrolled in law, then committed to art. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1855, studied drawing under Louis Lamothe in the tradition of Ingres, and spent the late 1850s studying the old masters in Italy. He began as an ambitious history painter before turning, in his thirties, to the contemporary subjects that made his name.

Degas helped organize and exhibited in most of the Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, though he rejected the label and preferred to call himself a realist, distinguishing his studio-built compositions and rigorous draftsmanship from the plein-air practice of Monet and Renoir. The suite of nudes he showed at the eighth Impressionist exhibition in 1886 drew the most concentrated critical writing of his lifetime. His eyesight failed progressively in his later decades, pushing him toward pastel and modeled wax. He died in Paris in 1917, his reputation secure as one of the leaders of late nineteenth-century French art.

Critical opinion of Degas moved from controversy to consensus across his own lifetime and has only deepened since. Early academic work drew praise from figures such as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and the critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary, and even as his realist subjects unsettled Salon-trained viewers, his draftsmanship was almost universally admired. Tate describes him as superb as a draftsman and particularly masterly in depicting movement, a classical painter of modern life who applied academic discipline to contemporary scenes. The 1886 nudes provoked the most concentrated body of writing on the artist during his lifetime, and the reaction was largely positive. Once filed narrowly as a painter of dancers, Degas is now read as one of the most complex and innovative figures of his generation, credited by historians with influencing Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and many of the leading figurative artists of the twentieth century. The persistent critical thread is the tension in his work between cool, calculated observation and intense psychological presence.

Degas is a top-tier Impressionist name with a deep and liquid market. His auction high is Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, which sold for USD 41,610,000 at Christie's New York on 12 May 2022, a record for the artist that surpassed an estimate of USD 20 million to 30 million. The figure refers to a posthumous bronze cast, one of an edition produced from the original wax after the artist's death; the unique wax original is held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. His previous high was Danseuse au repos, a pastel that sold for about USD 37 million at Sotheby's in 2008. The market spans a wide range of values and media, with the strongest results concentrated in the dancer and bather subjects.

Degas is liquid by the standards of nineteenth-century art, but value is highly sensitive to medium and period. A major pastel or oil of dancers occupies a different tier from a works-on-paper study or a later, weaker sheet, and the posthumous bronzes are a distinct category from the unique waxes, with their own edition and foundry history that buyers must understand. A full catalogue raisonne, the Lemoisne, anchors the painted and pastel oeuvre and makes provenance and cataloguing central to any purchase. With no living estate, due diligence rests on documented provenance and the scholarly literature. For a collector, the depth of institutional holding is the strongest signal of durability, while medium, condition, and provenance are the variables that most move price.