Waiting Edgar Degas

Waiting by Edgar Degas, pastel on paper c. 1882, is a painting of a young ballet dancer in white tutu and dance costume seated backstage on a bench next to an old woman in a black dress and hat holding an umbrella. The ballerina leans forward to touch her ankle, stretching and preparing for her performance as her teacher or chaperone gazes wistfully ahead. Degas carefully constructs the tilted composition to appear as a cropped slice of life, much like a photograph. The artist masterfully exploits the pastel medium to create form and colour in a variety of strokes and textures, from smoothly flattened areas to complex hatchings and expressively modelled details of figures and costumes. As in Degas' oil paintings, the painter also utilises a full range of tonal values, from the brilliant whites of the ballet costume to the deep, velvety blacks of the old woman’s dress and costume, with bold accents of brilliant and contrasting colours that tie the artist to the heart of the Impressionist movement. Edgar Degas (Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, 1834 - 1917) was a French painter, draftsman, sculptor, printmaker, a founder of the school of Impressionism, and a classical painter of dancers and scenes from modern life. Degas began to paint early in life, and after meeting the French classicist J.A.D. Ingres, Degas studied drawing in the manner of Ingres at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Louis Lamothe. Degas lived for 3 years in Italy, where he made many copies after Michelangelo and the masters of the Italian Renaissance. Establishing his Paris studio, the artist exhibited as a history painter but began to turn to subject matter from contemporary life, under the influence of his friend Edouard Manet. Disenfranchised from the official Paris Salon, Degas joined ranks with the independent Impressionist group and exhibited at their first show in 1874, though his classical approach, lack of spontaneity, and disdain of plein-air easel painting left him little in common with much of the group. Degas painted many portraits with profound psychological insight, many scenes from contemporary life and genre paintings, and devoted half of his life's work to colourful pictures of ballet dancers and classical female figures. Degas' bold experiments in colour which crossed boundaries between Realism, Impressionism, and Modern painting, his original compositional methods, and his painstaking, calculated classical drawing combined with the artist's cantankerous rejection of rigid rules, combined to create one of the most original and beloved body of works in the history of art.