How did Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres influence Edgar Degas?

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the 19th-century champion of Classical line, exerted a profound influence on Edgar Degas throughout his career. The young Degas developed a near reverence for Ingres, whose emphasis on the severity of line served as a foundational element in Degas's artistic development.1

This influence was reinforced early in Degas's training when he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Louis Lamothe, a minor follower of Ingres. Throughout his life, Degas remained an outstanding draftsman, and his admiration for Ingres helped foster his enduring fascination with the human form.23

While Degas also felt the lure of colorists like Eugène Delacroix—who was considered Ingres's antithesis—his maturity was defined by a confrontation between these two impulses. Ultimately, Degas successfully fused a Classical command of line and visual structure with a Romantic sensibility, a synthesis that allowed him to explore the technical complexity of art to an extreme degree.14