Degas: A New Vision

Born in Paris in 1834 to a well-to-do banker raised in Naples and his wife from New Orleans, Edgar Degas was the eldest of five children. Degas’s immediate family, as well as his relatives in Italy and Louisiana, were the focus of his early work. In this talk presented in conjunction with the exhibition Degas: A New Vision, George Shackelford traces Degas’s ever-widening embrace of a communal “family,” including childhood friends, artists, writers, musicians, dancers—and even prostitutes—who became the subjects of Degas’s work.