Self-portrait

Degas was about twenty when he painted this, and still signing himself Edgar de Gas, the son of a Paris banking family who expected him in law, not in a studio. He had just begun, then abandoned, formal training at the École des Beaux-Arts. Over these early years he painted himself again and again, something like forty times in all, not out of vanity so much as practice, a face he always had on hand to study. He looks out here quite soberly, a young man taking his own measure. Within a year or so he would leave for a long stay in Italy, copying the old masters. The debt to Ingres, whom he revered, is already there in the careful, deliberate drawing.