Degas [antikvár]

Life The de Gas family (the painter used this form of his surname until 1870, when he began signing himself in the form generally known) was Breton in origin; the artist's grandfather René-Hilaire de Gas had left France for Naples during the Revolution. Pierre-Auguste-Hyacinthe de Gas, the painter's father, moved to Paris to open a branch of the family bank, and married Marie-Célestine Musson, of a Creole family. Edgar-Hilaire-Germain de Gas was born in Paris on 19 July 1834. As a child, his father took him to see the works of the masters at the Louvre, and he later became acquainted with some of the best-known collectors and connoisseurs of his time. In 1845 he went to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he met Henri Rouart, who was to remain a close friend all his life. In 1847, his mother died. In 1852 Edgar Degas took his baccalauréat, left school, and began to study law. But although his father wanted a safe and traditional legal career for his son, he was sympathetic enough to his artistic interests to give him a studio in the family apartment in the Rue Mondovi; he allowed him to study drawing with Louis Lamothe, a pupil of Ingres, to work in the studio of the painter Barrias, and to spend time copying paintings and prints by Dürer, Mante-gna, Goya and Rembrandt in the Louvre. By 1853 Edgar was devoting all his attention to art. In 1855 he met Ingres, and entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he made friends with Tourny, Léon Bonnat, Ricard and Henri Fantin-Latour. But the pedantic narrowness of the teaching repelled him, and he left after a year. In 1856-7 he paid a long visit to Italy, staying with various relatives and making an intensive study of Renaissance painting. He travelled through the Abruzzi, Umbria, Latium, Tuscany and Campania, and stopped in particular in Naples, Rome, Orvieto and Florence, where, perhaps, he began sketching studies for the well-known collective portrait of 3