Edgar Degas, a French artist, is acknowledged as the master of drawing the human figure in motion. Degas worked in many mediums, preferring pastel to all others. He is perhaps best known for his paintings, drawings, and bronzes of ballerinas and of race horses.

The art of Degas reflects a concern for the psychology of movement and expression and the harmony of line and continuity of contour. These characteristics set Degas apart from the other impressionist painters, although he took part in all but one of the 8 impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. Degas was the son of a wealthy banker, and critics and art historians claim that his aristocratic family background instilled into his early art a haughty yet sensitive quality of detachment.

In the early 1870s the female ballet dancer became his favorite theme. He sketched from a live model in his studio and combined poses into groupings that depicted rehearsal and performance scenes in which dancers on stage, entering the stage, and resting or waiting to perform are shown simultaneously and in counterpoint, often from an oblique angle of vision.

I have always loved dabbling in pastels myself and hence, have found his work very very interesting and of course, impressive. Putting up some of the Ballerina series here....

Dance Class at the Opéra



Three Dancers in Violet Tutues



If there are any other Impressionists whose works you would want me to document here, do let me know!

The impressionist style of painting is characterized chiefly by concentration on the general impression produced by a scene or object and the use of unmixed primary colors and small strokes to simulate actual reflected light.


Impressionism, French Impressionnisme, a major movement, first in painting and later in music, that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about 1867 and 1886 by a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques. The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and colour.


The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Frédéric Bazille, who worked together, influenced each other, and exhibited together independently. Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne also painted in an Impressionist style for a time in the early 1870s. The established painter Édouard Manet, whose work in the 1860s greatly influenced Monet and others of the group, himself adopted the Impressionist approach about 1873.


Claude Monet


French painter, initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style. He is regarded as the archetypal Impressionist in that his devotion to the ideals of the movement was unwavering throughout his long career, and it is fitting that one of his pictures--Impression: Sunrise (Musée Marmottan, Paris; 1872)--gave the group his name.


While his work has spanned across various themes, his attention was focussed on the celebrated water-garden he created at Giverny, which served as the theme for the series of paintings on Water-lilies that began in 1899 and grew to dominate his work completely (in 1914 he had a special studio built in the grounds of his house so he could work on the huge canvases).


Presenting my personal favourite, Monet's Water-lilies.....

This pen and ink drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, depicting a man fitting his body to a circle and a square by adjusting the position of his arms and legs, is probably one of the most used motifs in the world of advertising. This is called the Vitruvian Man.
Vitruvius was an ancient Roman architect who wrote a series of ten books on architecture - one of the few collections of books of its type that survived into the Renaissance. In the third volume, which is on the proportions of temples, he states that these buildings should be based on the proportions of man, because the human body is the model of perfection. He justifies this by stating that the human body with arms and legs extended fits into the perfect geometric forms, the circle, and the square.
What makes this motif truly interesting is the universality of this form- of the man standing with his arms stretched out and legs adjusted to form a square. In fact, the entry step of several Indian classical dance forms like Bharatanatyam and Mohiniattam are also structured along similar lines. The image of the Nataraja is also aligned on similar lines. This pose is known as the Mandala. The Vitruvian Man and the Nataraja denote the perfect symmetry- that of a square in a circle.

I've finally gotten down to doing this... trying to get an art blog going, that is! I have wanted to start an art blog for the longest time not only because I am very interested in art but also because I wanted to have a page which would serve as a ready reckoner for other art lovers.
I do hope I manage to update this as regularly as I update flotsam!