| "In the late 1880s, Degas also developed a passion for photography.[15] Degas photographed many of his friends, often by lamplight, as in his double portrait of Renoir and Mallarmê. Other photographs, depicting dancers and nudes, were used for reference in some of Degas' drawings and paintings.[16]
As the years passed, Degas became isolated, due in part to his belief that a painter could have no personal life.[17] The Dreyfus Affair controversy brought his anti-Semitic leanings to the fore and Degas broke with all his Jewish friends.[18] His argumentative nature was deplored by Renoir, who said of him: ""What a creature Degas was, that Degas! All his friends had to leave him; I was one of the last to go, but even I couldn't stay till the end.""[19]
Although Degas is known to have been working in pastel as late as the end of 1907, and is believed to have continued making sculpture as late as 1910, Degas apparently ceased working in 1912, when the impending demolition of his longtime residence on the rue Victor Massé forced a wrenching move to quarters on the boulevard de Clichy.[20] Degas never married and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, restlessly wandering the streets of Paris[21] before dying in 1917.
[edit] Artistic style
The Dance Class (La Classe de Danse),1873–1876, oil on canvas, by Edgar Degas
Degas is often identified as an Impressionist, an understandable but insufficient description. Impressionism originated in the 1860s and 1870s and grew, in part, from the realism of such painters as Courbet and Corot. The Impressionists painted the realities of the world around them using bright, ""dazzling"" colors, concentrating primarily on the effects of light, and hoping to infuse their scenes with immediacy.
Technically, Degas differs from the Impressionists in that Degas ""never adopted the Impressionist color fleck"",[22] and Degas continually belittled their practice of painting en plein air.[23] ""He was often as anti-impressionist as the critics who reviewed the shows"", according to art historian Carol Armstrong; as Degas himself explained, ""no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and of the study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know nothing.""[24] Nonetheless, Degas is described more accurately as an Impressionist than as a member of any other movement. His scenes of Parisian life, his off-center compositions, his experiments with color and form, and his friendship with several key Impressionist artists—most notably Mary Cassatt and Édouard Manet—all relate him intimately to the Impressionist movement.
Degas' style reflects his deep respect for the old masters (he was an enthusiastic copyist well into middle age)[26] and his great admiration for Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix. Degas was also a collector of Japanese prints, whose compositional principles influenced his work, as did the vigorous realism of popular illustrators such as Daumier and Gavarni. Although famous for horses and dancers, Degas began with conventional historical paintings such as The Young Spartans, in which his gradual progress toward a less idealized treatment of the figure is already apparent. During his early career, Degas also painted portraits of individuals and groups; an example of the latter is The Bellelli Family (c.1858–67), a brilliantly composed and psychologically poignant portrayal of his aunt, her husband, and their children. In this painting, as in The Young Spartans and many later works, Degas was drawn to the tensions present between men and women. In his early paintings, Degas already evidenced the mature style that Degas would later develop more fully by cropping subjects awkwardly and by choosing unusual viewpoints."
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