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Edgar Degas — Portrait after a picture by Edgar Degas (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

The quotations of

Edgar Degas

French Impressionist artist

1834–1917

4 quotes, most often on Art.

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.
‘The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas’, (1961)
- Art
I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament — temperament is the word — I know nothing.
Quote of Degas in conversation with George Moore, later quoted by Moore in Impressions and Opinions (1891)
- Art
If I were the government I would have a special brigade of gendarmes to keep an eye on artists who paint landscapes from nature. Oh, I don’t mean to kill anyone; just a little dose of bird-shot now and then as a warning.
As quoted in Ambroise Vollard, Degas: An Intimate Portrait (1927), p. 56
- Art
- Comedy
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.
Ambroise Vollard, Degas: An Intimate Portrait (1927), “As He Grows Old”, p. 87
- Art
- Dancing

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