A new exhibit at the Lightner Museum in St Augustine features the work of the 19th century French Impressionist painter and sculptor Edgar Degas.
Degas came of age at the height of the Realism movement but the Lightner’s Megan Mosley said the artist had something different in mind for his work.
“He was educated at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. And so he came up from that very historical neo-classicist version of painting. And he was interested in sort of switching it up and focusing on the everyday lives of people.”
One of Degas’s most famous works is his painting of a ballet dance class. However, Mosley said the Lightner exhibition features preliminary pencil-and-paper sketches of scenes the artist made before putting brush-to-canvas.
“They show a lot of that early technique, his foundational work that he put into the paintings. He would frequently go to places like the Louvre or out in the city to do these drawings and then he’d take them back to his studio and that’s where he’d create his paintings.”
Edgar Degas: The Private Impressionist Works on Paper opens Friday at the Lightner Museum at 75 King Street in St Augustine. The exhibit runs through June 16.
Contact reporter Cyd Hoskinson at choskinson@wjct.org, 904-358-6351 and on Twitter at @cydwjctnews.
