Degas

Here are Degas’s favorite sub-jects-ballet dancers, washer-women, jockeys, portraits, nudes-painted with his astonishing delicacy of touch and mastery of drawing, color, and light. The thirty-six handsomely reproduced full-color illustrations of his oils and pastels show these in all their direct-ness, freshness, and strength.
Life itself was subject enough for Degas, who has given the world a highly individual vision of everyday experience.
He was a leader of the generation of French painters who turned their backs on everything that even suggested the pretentious, the supercharged, the heroic-dethroning
Romanticism and installing Impressionism in its place and paving the way for modern art.
Georges Charensol, the author, is a leading young French critic and art historian.