Degas by Gordon and Forge

Edgar Degas was the most complex of all nineteenth-century painters. A very private man who scorned publicity, Degas remains one of the least understood artists of his generation. Although he is known for his depiction of modern subjects - racecourse scenes, cafe-concerts, ballet dancers, bathers - his was a classical art based upon drawing and a long study of the masters; and although he exhibited with the Impressionists, who were primarily landscape painters, he sought to salvage the figure as the central subject of painting.

Andrew Forge brings us Degas's life: his privileged upbringing; his travels to Italy and America; his close contact with Monet, Manet, Cassatt, and the other Impressionists; his love of theater, music, and the ballet; and the ceaseless quest for perfection in his art that caused him to draw and redraw the same subjects over and over again, making them completely his own in the process.