Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas in Paris on 19 July 1834, into a well-off banking family. His father hoped he would study law, but in 1855 he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and worked under Louis Lamothe, a pupil of Ingres, the draughtsman he admired above all. Years in Italy followed, where he copied the Renaissance masters, and on his return he painted portraits of family and friends and ambitious history pictures.
In the late 1860s he turned to modern life: the racecourse, the café, the music hall and, above all, the ballet. He painted dancers rehearsing, resting and waiting in the wings, usually in unexpected, cropped compositions. He also painted milliners and laundresses with the same cool, exact eye. Degas helped organise the Impressionist exhibitions and showed in seven of the eight between 1874 and 1886, yet he always called himself a realist, and he drew and composed in the studio rather than out of doors.
From the 1870s his eyesight began to fail. He worked more and more in pastel and in sculpture, modelling dancers and horses in wax, and the one sculpture he showed in his lifetime, the Little Dancer, appeared in 1881. He never married, lived increasingly as a recluse, and died in Paris on 27 September 1917. After his death the wax figures found in his studio were cast in bronze.