Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (1834–1917) has been called “the most misunderstood of famous modern artists.” He is at once utterly familiar and remarkably enigmatic. Popularly labeled “the Impressionist who painted ballet dancers,” he is, in fact, far more than that—a tough, complex, unpredictable artist who is difficult to categorize. A brilliant draftsman, with an unerring grasp of eloquent contour and telling interval, he possessed one of the most acute, pitiless eyes in the history of French painting; only Chardin and Matisse seem comparable. But Degas was also fascinated by the ephemeral, the incomplete, and the transient, and (as with Chardin and Matisse) his desire for optical truth—which is not the same as verisimilitude—was filtered through a powerful sense of abstract structure and willed harmony, so much so that it’s even arguable whether Degas was an Impressionist at all, despite his close association with the artists who came to be known by that name. The closer we look, the more elusive he seems. There’s always something new to discover about Degas’s art, but the more we know, the more various and full of contradictions it appears to be and the less we are able to pin down its author.

Hailed today as a radical innovator, a pioneer modernist, Degas was a lifelong admirer of the conservative Ingres and was profoundly attracted to both the clarity of Neo-Classicism and the formal certainties of the Academy. In an era when ambitious painters struggled to produce monumental canvases designed to attract attention at the