Edgar Degas

Degas made the ballet a central subject of his work, painting and drawing dancers in rehearsal, in the wings and in the Opera foyer in oil, pastel and chalk. Jean-Baptiste Faure commissioned The Dance Class, which Degas delivered in 1874 for 5,000 francs. He later told Ambroise Vollard that people called him the painter of dancing girls, but that his chief interest in dancers lay in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.

Degas modelled The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer in tinted wax, with Marie van Goethem as the model, and dressed it in a real bodice, tutu, stockings, ballet shoes and a wig with a ribbon. It was announced for the 1880 group exhibition but shown only in April 1881, and it is the only sculpture he exhibited in his lifetime. Reviewers were divided: Huysmans called it the only truly modern initiative he knew in sculpture, while others attacked the girl's expression. The work was cast in bronze only in 1921.

In December 1873 Degas joined Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Morisot, Cezanne and others in forming a cooperative society for unjuried exhibitions, and its first show opened on 15 April 1874 with ten works by him. He showed in the group's exhibitions between 1874 and the last, in 1886, where he exhibited a suite of pastels of women bathing. He objected to being called an Impressionist, and his friend and biographer Lemoisne notes that he never adopted the group's open-air painting.

Beyond the ballet, Degas painted scenes of modern Paris: racecourses (Faure bought four racing scenes in 1873-74), laundresses and women ironing, and cafe-concert singers. In a Cafe (The Absinthe Drinker) was sold in London in 1876 through the dealer Charles Deschamps. His 1886 pastels of women washing, drying and combing their hair were catalogued as a suite of nudes at their toilette.

In 1876 Degas told the critic Jules Claretie that he had found a new technique for engraving, while the printmaker Marcellin Desboutin wrote that he talked only of metallurgists, lead casters and lithographers in his search for ways to reproduce his drawings. In 1880 he described the etchings he showed at the fifth group exhibition as 'experiments and states of plates'; one of them, Leaving the Bath, passed through twenty-two states.

Seeking out industrial printers and presenting unfinished states of a plate as part of the show is consistent with a strong taste for experimentation; the Boggs catalogue notes that the pursuit displaced any thought of financial return. Experimentation

Ambroise Vollard recalled that Degas once showed him a small wax dancer he had redone 'for the twentieth time' and said it would be ready for the caster in a day or two. The next day only the original lump of wax remained, and Degas told him he would not take a bucket of gold for the pleasure of destroying it and starting over.

Destroying a nearly finished work to begin again is consistent with perfectionism; it is a single-source anecdote, but Vollard also reports that Degas painted out a figure and took back pictures that were reframed, and the Boggs catalogue records the Little Dancer's repeated delays. Perfectionism

In April 1873 Degas wrote to the painter James Tissot that he had given up plans to show at the Salon. That December he joined the cooperative society, and in March 1874 he wrote that he was 'running the thing with energy' because 'there must be a salon of Realists'. The society's first exhibition opened on 15 April 1874; it lost money and the society was dissolved in May, but Degas went on to show in the group's later exhibitions.

Moving from the official Salon to an unjuried exhibition he helped organise is consistent with a strong need to control how his work was judged and shown; Lemoisne notes he had exhibited at the Salons through the Second Empire. Need for Autonomy