Musée No:397.018
Regular price £25.00Girl in Red
Artist: Edgar Degas
Date: 1866
Edgar Degas, (1834 –1917), was a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings. In 1855 he entered the École des Beaux-Arts, a year later he travelled to Italy and stayed for three years. In Paris he continued to study at the Louvre, where he met Manet. The pair quickly developed a friendly rivalry and a dislike for the “art establishment”.
In 1873, Degas, along with Monet, Sisley and several other painters, formed the Société Anonyme des Artistes, a group with the aim of putting on art exhibitions out of the Salon's control. He also learned that his brother had run up enormous business debts. Degas had to sell his house and an inherited art collection to preserve his family's reputation, and pay off his brother's debts.
Degas participated in the first impressionist exhibition of 1874. He continued to exhibit with them until 1886 but never really considered himself a member of the group, preferring to call himself a realist or naturalist. Degas worked with models in his studio and, later in his career, from his imagination, as opposed to en plein air. He exhibited modern portraits of modern women — milliners, laundresses and ballet dancers — painted from radical perspectives. In addition to painting, he experimented with engraving, pastels, sculpture, and photography - he used the photos for reference in drawings and paintings. He travelled widely across Europe but his subject matter stayed the same: Parisian, the female nude and the ballet dancer. In the 1890s as his personal wealth grew he began his own art collection, which included paintings by El Greco, Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Ingres, Delacroix.
There is no information about 'The Girl in Red' herself.
