Galerie Paul Prouté

Perhaps because his social status long shielded him from financial hardship, Edgar Degas was the Impressionist artist who experimented most extensively with various techniques. Trained as a painter, he was also a draftsman (particularly in pastel, a medium in which he spearheaded a fruitful revival), a photographer, and a sculptor. However, he had a distinctly special affinity for printmaking. He created some fifty copperplate prints (in which etching, aquatint, and drypoint are combined in ways that are at times extremely complex—Degas produced numerous test prints and created multiple states), nearly twenty lithographs, and more than two hundred monotypes (no one before him had taken such a keen interest in them), Degas extended his quest for movement and the fleeting moment through printmaking and revisited many of his favorite motifs (with the exception of equestrian subjects): ballerinas, café-concert singers, and women at their dressing tables appear alongside portraits, landscapes (more numerous than in his paintings), and scenes from brothels (these intimate pieces were primarily produced as monotypes). Degas drew Pissarro and Mary Cassatt into his explorations—the latter is the subject of some of the artist’s most famous prints.