Degas Quotes

One must have a high opinion of a work of art - not the work one is creating at the moment, but of that which one desires to achieve one day. Without this it is not worthwhile working. ~ Edgar Degas

I don't admit that a woman draws that well! ~ Edgar Degas

For those who don't know what they are doing, painting is easy.
For those who do know what they are doing, painting is difficult. ~ Edgar Degas

If I were in the government I would have a brigade of policemen assigned to keeping an eye on people who paint landscapes outdoors. Oh, I wouldn't want anyone killed. I'd be satisfied with just a little buckshot to begin with. ~ Edgar Degas

People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself. ~ Edgar Degas

One reproduces only that which is striking; that is to say, the necessary. Thus, one's recollections and inventions are liberated from the tyranny which nature exerts. ~ Edgar Degas

Art' is the same word as 'artifice,' that is to say, something deceitful. It must succeed in giving the impression of nature by false means. ~ Edgar Degas

Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again. ~ Edgar Degas

Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance ... ~ Edgar Degas

The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them. ~ Edgar Degas

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty. ~ Edgar Degas

I spit upon the dancers painted by Degas. I spit upon their short bodies, their stiff stays, their toes whereupon they spin like peg-tops, above all upon that chambermaid face. They might have looked timeless, Remeses the Great, but not the chambermaid, that old maid history. I spit! I spit! I spit! ~ W.B.Yeats

There is more similarity in the marketing challenge of selling a precious painting by Degas and a frosted mug of root beer than you ever thought possible. ~ A. Alfred Taubman

And please, whatever you do, don't tell us that what we do, either in love or lust, is unnatural. For one thing if what you mean by that is that animals don't do it, then you are quite simply in factual error.
There are plenty of activities or qualities we could list that are most certainly unnatural if you are so mad as to think that humans are not part of nature, or so dull-witted as to believe that 'natural' means 'all natures but human nature': mercy, for example, is un¬natural, an altruistic, non-selfish care and love for other species is unnatural; charity is unnatural, justice is unnatural, virtue is unnatural, indeed - and this surely is the point - the idea of virtue is unnatural, within such a foolish, useless meaning of the word 'natural'. Animals, poor things, eat in order to survive: we, lucky things, do that too, but we also have Abbey Crunch biscuits, Armagnac, selle d'agneau, tortilla chips, sauce béarnaise, Vimto, hot buttered crumpets, Chateau Margaux, ginger-snaps, risotto nero and peanut-butter sandwiches - these things have nothing to do with survival and everything to do with pleasure, connoisseurship and plain old greed. Animals, poor things, copulate in order to reproduce: we, lucky things, do that too, but we also have kinky boots, wank-mags, leather thongs, peep-shows, statuettes by Degas, bedshows, Tom of Finland, escort agencies and the Journals of Anaïs Nin - these things have nothing to do with reproduction and everything to do with ~ Stephen Fry

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory. ~ Edgar Degas

What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming. ~ Edgar Degas

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. ~ Edgar Degas

The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe. ~ Edgar Degas

C'est vrai. Voilá quelqu'un qui sent comme moi. (It is true. There is someone who feels as I do). ~ Edgar Degas

Nothing in art should seem accidental, not even movement ~ Edgar Degas

Once they witnessed one of his painting sold at auction for $100,000. And asked how you do it, he said, 'I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.' ~ Edgar Degas

I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, 'That's a pretty little thing,' after I had finished a picture. ~ Edgar Degas

Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes. ~ Edgar Degas

One has to commit a painting,' said Degas,
'the way one commits a crime. ~ Elizabeth Bishop

Degas was obsessed by the art of classical ballet, because to him it said something about the human condition. He was not a balletomane looking for an alternative world to escape into. Dance offered him a display in which he could find, after much searching, certain human secrets. ~ John Berger

Instantaneity is photography. ~ Edgar Degas

You must aim high, not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do to-day. Otherwise, working is just a waste of time. ~ Edgar Degas

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people ~ Edgar Degas

The first sight of Degas' pictures was the turning point of my artistic life. ~ Mary Cassatt

Wine is a sensual pleasure. Its real value is when it splashes into the glass. It is not in the category of a Degas painting. The point is not for people to go to their cellar and stroke their bottles. ~ Serena Sutcliffe

Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money. ~ Edgar Degas

The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart. Something heroic and remote. ~ Edgar Degas

I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of colour. ~ Edgar Degas

Even in front of nature one must compose. ~ Edgar Degas

Degas is a master of creating compositions that don't look composed. ~ Max Liebermann

A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs! ... ~ Paul Gauguin

What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will. ~ Paul Valery

Manet also had an argument with Degas, the end result being that they each returned paintings that they had previous given to each other. ~ Doris Lanier

The poet Mallarmé listened to the painter Degas complaining about his inability to write poems even though "he was full of ideas." "My dear Degas," Mallarmé responded, "poems are not made out of ideas. They're made out of words. ~ Stephane Mallarme

Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality. ~ Edgar Degas

A picture is an artificial work, outside nature. It calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime. ~ Edgar Degas

People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes. ~ Edgar Degas

Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance. ~ Paul Valery

What a horrible thing yellow is. ~ Edgar Degas

Poetry is a kind of lying, necessarily. To profit the poet or beauty. But also in that truth may be told only so. Those who, admirably, refuse to falsify (as those who will not risk pretensions) are excluded from saying even so much. Degas said he didn't paint what he saw, but what would enable them to see the thing he had. ~ Jack Gilbert

There is love, and there is work; and we have only one heart. ~ Edgar Degas

These women of mine are decent, simple human beings who have no other concern than that of their physical condition ... it is as though one were watching through a keyhole. ~ Edgar Degas

Drawing is not the same as form, it is a way of seeing form. ~ Edgar Degas

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything. ~ Edgar Degas

I have hundreds of art books and the biographies of artists I love, such as Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas. ~ Jamie Wyeth

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see. ~ Edgar Degas

It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle. ~ Edgar Degas

Great patience is called for on the hard path that I have entered on. ~ Edgar Degas

I would rather do nothing than do a rough sketch without having looked at anything. My memories will do better. ~ Edgar Degas

And even this heart of mine has something artificial. The dancers have sewn it into a bag of pink satin, pink satin slightly faded, like their dancing shoes. ~ Edgar Degas

A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody. ~ Edgar Degas

Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature. ~ Edgar Degas

A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth. ~ Edgar Degas

It is people's movement that consoles us. If the leaves of a tree did not move, how sad would be the tree - and so should we. ~ Edgar Degas

The human quality Degas most admired was endurance. ~ John Berger

Daylight is too easy. What I want is difficult - the atmosphere of lamps and moonlight. ~ Edgar Degas

Art is vice. You don't wed it, you rape it. ~ Edgar Degas

I was also, slowly, to learn that there were painters whom you grew out of (like the Pre-Raphaelites); painters you grew into (Chardin); painters towards whom you had a lifelong, sighing indifference (Greuze); painters you suddenly became aware of after years of unnoticing (Liotard, Hammershoi, Cassatt, Vallotton); painters assuredly great but to whom your response was always a bit negligent (Rubens); and painters who would, whatever age you were, remain persistently, indomitably great (Piero, Rembrandt, Degas). And then – perhaps the slowest advance of all – I permitted myself to believe, or rather see, that not all Modernism was entirely wonderful. That some parts of it were better than others; that maybe Picasso could be vainglorious, Miró and Klee could be twee, Léger could be repetitive, and so on. I eventually came to realise that Modernism had strengths and weaknesses and a built-in obsolescence, just like all other art movements. Which, as it happens, made it more rather than less interesting. ~ Julian Barnes

Art is really a battle. ~ Edgar Degas

Truth is never ugly when one can find in it what one needs. ~ Edgar Degas

The frame is the reward of the artist. ~ Edgar Degas

Everybody has talent at
twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty. ~ Edgar Degas

Make portraits of people in typical, familiar poses, being sure above all to give their faces the same kind of expression as their bodies. ~ Edgar Degas

The paintings that laughed at him merrily from the walls were like nothing he had ever seen or dreamed of. Gone were the flat, thin surfaces. Gone was the sentimental sobriety. Gone was the brown gravy in which Europe had been bathing its pictures for centuries. Here were pictures riotously mad with the sun. With light and air and throbbing vivacity. Paintings of ballet girls backstage, done in primitive reds, greens, and blues thrown next to each other irreverantly. He looked at the signature. Degas. ~ Irving Stone

A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy. ~ Edgar Degas

Be sure to give the same expression to a person's face that you give to his body. ~ Edgar Degas

Success! Success! The enemy of progress! ~ Edgar Degas

I don't belong to any school. I work in my corner. I admire Degas. ~ Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec

It's easy to have talent at 20 but what is difficult is to have talent at 50. ~ Edgar Degas

Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it. ~ Edgar Degas

The moods of sadness that come over anyone who takes up art ... these dismal moods have very little compensation. ~ Edgar Degas

So that's the telephone? They ring, and you run. ~ Edgar Degas

Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effect of the lighting. ~ Edgar Degas

I would like to be famous but unknown. ~ Edgar Degas

Sometimes it made him [Degas] furious that he could not find a chink in my armor, and there would be months when we just could not see each other, and then something I painted would bring us together again. ~ Mary Cassatt

When a figure painter executes a landscape he treats it as if it were a face; Degas' landscapes are unparalleled because they are visionary landscapes. ~ Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec

Women can never forgive me; they hate me, they feel that I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry. ~ Edgar Degas

Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience. But my women are simple, honest creatures who are concerned with nothing beyond their physical occupations ... it is as if you were looking through a keyhole. ~ Edgar Degas

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation. ~ Edgar Degas

Do portraits of people in familiar and typical attitudes, above all give to their face the same choice of expression that one gives to their body. ~ Edgar Degas

Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work? ~ Edgar Degas

I've had so many influences and sources of inspiration as an illustrator that it is impossible to name just one. I loved Aubrey Beardsley when I was a student, and then Edmund Dulac and other Golden Age illustrators made a big impact, as well as Victorian painters like Richard Dadd and Edward Burne-Jones. My long-term heroes though are Albretch Durer, Brueghel, Hieronymous Bosch, Jan Van Eyck, Leonardo, Botticelli, Rembrandt, Turner and Degas. What most of them have in common is brilliant draughtsmanship and a strong linear or graphic quality. Most are also printmakers. The one I keep going back to and who fascinates me the most is JMW Turner, the greatest watercolourist. ~ Alan Lee

Taste! It doesn't exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it. ~ Edgar Degas

It seems to me that today, if the artist wishes to be serious - to cut out a little original niche for himself, or at least preserve his own innocence of personality - he must once more sink himself in solitude. There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profit; in order to do anything at all we need (so to speak) the wit and ideas of our neighbors as much as the businessmen need the funds of others to win on the market. All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment. ~ Edgar Degas