Degas, an impressionist painter?

Whereas Edgar Degas is today considered one of the great impressionist artists – he was a diligent participant at the “impressionist exhibitions”, being represented at seven of them – he had a complex relationship with his colleagues and plein air painting, which was a distinctive feature of the impressionist period in the career of many artists.
At the end of his life, Degas was keen to point out the distance between his art and that of the impressionists: “If I were the government, I would have a special brigade of gendarmes to keep an eye on the people who paint landscapes from nature...” he is supposed to have confided to Ambroise Vollard. He also had harsh words for Claude Monet, who nonetheless admired the work of his elder colleague very much. For example, standing in front of Monet's Lilies, he remarked dryly that he did “not feel the need to lose consciousness before a pond”, and told the painter to his face, “I only stayed a moment at your exhibition. Your paintings made me dizzy”.
Henceforth, though Degas remained active in the impressionist revolution of the manner in which an artist looked upon his motif, he diff erentiated himself from his colleagues, introducing in particular a novel attention to scenes lit artificially, and concentrating on more personal motifs, such as bodily movement, which he studied through dance.