DEGAS Edgar

Hilaire Germain Edgar de GAS, dit Edgar DEGAS, born 19 July 1834 in Paris and died 27 September 1917 in the same city, is a French painter, engraver, sculptor and photographer, naturalist and Impressionist.

While Degas is a founding member of the Impressionist group, his work is so varied by his themes and practice that he does not reach them in their most well-known traits. His exceptional situation does not escape criticism then, often destabilized by his vanguardism, which is still the subject of much debate among art historians.

Edgar de Gas was an aristocrat, son of Augustus de Gas, banker, and Celestine Musson, an American Creole from New Orleans. Her maternal grandfather, Germain Musson, of French origin, was born in Port-au-Prince (Haiti) and settled in New Orleans in 1810.

De Gas was born in Paris at no 8 rue Saint-Georges on July 19, 1834, and grew up in a cultivated bourgeois milieu. He has two brothers and two sisters and enjoys a golden childhood on Rue Saint-Georges. Between 1845 and 1853, he studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand where he taught drawing Léon Cogniet8 . He meets Henri Rouart, Paul Valpinçon and Ludovic Halévy who will be his intimate friends. In 1847, his mother died at the age of thirty-two.