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Who was Louis Lamothe and how did he teach Edgar Degas?
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Edgar Degas
Self-Portrait, oil on paper by Edgar Degas, c. 1855–56; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Louis Lamothe was a minor painter and a follower of the renowned French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.1
In 1855, Edgar Degas’s father encouraged him to register at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied under Lamothe’s supervision. Through this instruction, Lamothe helped foster Degas’s early development as an artist, emphasizing the importance of drawing and the study of historical precedents found in the Louvre.1