A day like today: Degas

Some artists are like antennas: multipliers of all the contradictions of the times they have to live.

One such case is that of a painter known as Hilaire-Germain-Edgar de Gas, better known as Degas, spoiled by fortune but who launched into the random space of art, where not all succeed, despite talent.

Degas, a family of bankers and cotton merchants, was encouraged by his father to study law, but fortunately, Degas suspected that in the world the laws were lacking and the works of art were lacking. Then he took the oil and the brushes, and although he was inspired by the masters of the past, his paintings were modernist.

Degas has the merit of having perpetuated and dignified the inconsequential: horse races or any intimacy in the theatrical life.

However, Degas, the darling of fortune, faced a precarious economy in his adult years, and had to do what he never wanted: to sell his paintings; this and a progressive loss of vision, made him sullen, arrogant and ultra-conservative, because he went so far as to affirm that the working class should work, not study or prepare.

Degas, the man who marked a life with his art and talent, had been born on a day like today, July 19, 1834.

Painters and art lovers prefer to remember it as the best it could be and do: as a master of painting.