Ladies' hats were his waterlillies - the obsessive brilliance of Edgar Degas

Lucian Freud once said that ‘being able to draw well is the hardest thing — far harder than painting, as one can easily see from the fact that there are so few great draughtsmen compared to the number of great painters — Ingres, Degas, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, just a few.’ Christopher Lloyd’s new study of Degas’s drawings and pastels, with over 200 beautifully reproduced illustrations, demonstrates that Edgar Degas (1834–1917) deserves his place on that list. And more than that, it shows that for him there was no distinction between painting and drawing.

In his art these categories so blur together that it is hard to say whether certain pictures — pastels with tempera paint additions, for example — are one or the other. And everything he did was based on drawing, which was, Degas said, a way of ‘seeing form’ (or as David Hockney has put it, ‘learning to see’).

On Friday, 13 February 1874 Edmond de Goncourt paid a visit to Degas. He spent the whole day looking at the work of this ‘strange painter’, who had ‘fallen in love with modern life, and out of all the subjects in modern life has chosen washerwomen and ballet dancers’. Looking though this new book must be a little like visiting Degas’s studio that day.

Degas’s art can seem repetitive, because in a way it was. Do the same subject, he advised, over and over again: ten times, a hundred times. ‘I assure you,’ he informed George Moore, ‘no art was ever less spontaneous than mine.’ Consequently, there are flocks of ballet dancers in this selection. They obsessed the artist because the dance was a real-life laboratory for the study of a range of movement that had never been depicted before. But personally, though I understand why they so interested Degas, I can see enough of his dancers.