DEGAS belonged to the group of Impressionists, but he was above all a painter of the human figure, unlike his friends who devoted themselves chiefly to landscape. His artistic aims, however, were the same: in his pictures of ballet dancers and jockeys, bodies flash by in a vision of light and color that speaks to the viewer of the transitoriness of the moment captured there. Yet behind his radiant vision of what colors mean and do there lurks a solid feeling for classical form construction. In this he carries on the tradition of an Ingres, but he brings to it a new , and startling way of seeing things, a masterly keenness of observation.
