Editing Edgar Degas (section)

==Early life==
[[File:Edgar Degas (1834-1917).jpg|thumb|Edgar Degas {{Circa|1855}}–1860<ref>Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 17</ref>]]
Degas was born in [[Paris]], [[France]], into a moderately wealthy family. He was the oldest of five children of Célestine Musson De Gas, a [[Louisiana Creole people|Creole]] from [[New Orleans]], [[Louisiana]], and Augustin De Gas, a banker.<ref>Baumann, et al. 1994, p. 86.</ref> His maternal grandfather Germain Musson was born in [[Port-au-Prince]], [[Haiti]], of French descent, and had settled in New Orleans in 1810.<ref>{{cite book |last=Brown |first=Marilyn R |title=Degas and the Business of Art |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vWTZpFv4m9QC&pg=PA15 |access-date=29 September 2014 |year=1994 |page=14 |publisher=Penn State Press |isbn=0-271-04431-4}}</ref>

[[File:Edgar Degas, Self-Portrait, c. 1855, NGA 73867.jpg|alt=Self-portrait of the artist Edgar Degas, in red chalk on paper, from about 1855, in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.|thumb|left|upright|Edgar Degas, ''Self-Portrait'', {{Circa|1855}}. Red chalk on laid paper; 31 x 23.3 cm (12 3/16 x 9 3/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington.]] 
Degas (he adopted this less grandiose spelling of his family name when he became an adult)<ref>The family's ancestral name was Degas. Jean Sutherland Boggs explains that De Gas was the spelling, "with some pretensions, used by the artist's father when he moved to Paris to establish a French branch of his father's Neapolitan bank." While Edgar Degas's brother René adopted the still more aristocratic de Gas, the artist reverted to the original spelling, Degas, by the age of thirty. Baumann, et al. 1994, p. 98.</ref> began his schooling at age eleven, enrolling in the [[Lycée Louis-le-Grand]].<ref>Baumann, et al. 1994, p. 86</ref> His mother died when he was thirteen, and the main influences on him for the remainder of his youth were his father and several unmarried uncles.<ref>Gordon and Forge 1988, p. 16</ref>
Degas began to paint early in life. By the time he graduated from the Lycée with a ''[[baccalauréat]]'' in literature in 1853, at age 18, he had turned a room in his home into an artist's studio. Upon graduating, he registered as a copyist in the [[Louvre|Louvre Museum]], but his father expected him to go to [[law school]]. Degas duly enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the [[University of Paris]] in November 1853 but applied little effort to his studies.

In 1855, he met [[Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres]], whom he revered and whose advice he never forgot: "Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist."<ref>Werner 1969, p. 14</ref> In April of that year Degas was admitted to the [[École des Beaux-Arts]]. He studied drawing there with [[Louis Lamothe]], under whose guidance he flourished, following the style of Ingres.<ref>Canaday 1969, p. 930–931</ref>

In July 1856, Degas traveled to [[Italy]], where he would remain for the next three years. In 1858, while staying with his aunt's family in [[Naples]], he made the first studies for his early masterpiece ''[[The Bellelli Family]]''. He also drew and painted numerous copies of works by [[Michelangelo]], [[Raphael]], [[Titian]], and other [[Renaissance]] artists, but—contrary to conventional practice—he usually selected from an altarpiece a detail that had caught his attention: a secondary figure, or a head which he treated as a portrait.<ref>Dunlop 1979, p. 19</ref>