Edgar Degas

The little red hen finds none of her lazy friends willing to help her plant, harvest, or grind wheat into flour, but all are eager to eat the bread she makes from it.

Though best known for his depictions of dancers and bathers, Edgar Degas repeatedly returned to the subject of millinery over the course of three decades. In masterpieces such as The Millinery Shop (1879-86) and The Milliners (ca. 1898), he captured scenes of milliners fashioning and women wearing elaborakte, colorful hats. Featuring sumptuous paintings, pastels, and preparatory drawings by Degas, Cassatt, Manet, Renoir, and Toulouse-Lautrec, among others, this generously illustrated book surveys the millinery industry of 19th-century Paris. Peppered throughout with photographs, posters, and prints of French hats, this book includes essays that explore Degas's particular interest in the millinery trade; the tension between modern fashion and reverence for history and the grand art-historical tradition; a chronicle of Parisian milliners from Caroline Reboux to Coco Chanel; and examples of how the millinery trade is depicted in literature. Brilliantly linking together the worlds of industry, art, and fashion, this groundbreaking book examines the fundamental role of hats and hat-makers in 19th-century culture.

No artist captured the essence of ballet as beautifully as Degas. This collection presents the dancers at the barre, in rehersal, and in performance.

"French artist Hilaire Germaine Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is best known for his studies of the human figure, his ballet dancers, his portraits, his occupational groups. In his drawings, Degas' working methods can be seen and studied and his always human figures can be enjoyed as much if not more than in the finished works. Reproduced in this book are 100 of Degas' drawings, including eight in full color. They range from early studies to portraits of Manet, Madame Hertel, Madame Camus, Duranty and others to sketches of dancers and nudes, race track scenes, travel scenes and other works from 1856 to 1900. Through following the drawings, you can see Degas' outstanding way of capturing scenes and see him developing the careful casualness that was to make him foremost of the Realist-Romantic artists. Also can be seen are his new uses of space and artistic focus, qualities he received from other artists in the Impressionist group. There are works in varied media - pencil, crayon, pastel, charcoal and many others. And there are studies for paintings and sculptures that show his working methods. Most of these drawings cannot be seen anywhere else in published form"--Back cover.

Presents the life and paintings of Edgar Degas in a first person narrative drawn from letters, notebooks, and people's stories about the artist.