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Degas helped organize the Impressionist exhibitions and showed alongside Monet and Renoir, though he had little interest in painting sunlight in the open air. He worked indoors, under the gas lamps of the Paris Opera, watching dancers rehearse and rest, catching bodies in awkward, unposed moments.

At the sixth Impressionist show, in 1881, he unveiled a wax statue two-thirds life size, the Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, dressed in a real cloth tutu and a wig. Critics were appalled. They called the girl ugly and depraved and read her face as the mark of a born criminal, a fashionable idea of the day. Degas, stung, never exhibited a sculpture again in his lifetime.

His eyes were failing him through these years, so he moved toward pastel and modelling in wax, media he could work by feel and in strong color. He grew more solitary and more sour, and during the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, when France split over a Jewish army officer falsely convicted of treason, Degas took the anti-Dreyfus side and broke with old Jewish friends, among them the Halévy family who had welcomed him for years. He died in Paris in 1917, almost completely blind.