Despite being exhibited with the Impressionist school of painting - with which he was mistakenly associated - French artist Edgar Degas was scathing of the movement. Plein-air, or open air - the creative cry of Claude Monet and his cohorts - was anathema to Degas, the consummate draughtsman and technical innovator. On visiting a Monet exhibition at Durand-Paul in Paris, Degas declared: "I met Monet and said: 'Let me get out of here. Those reflections in the water hurt my eyes!' Degas claimed Monet's pictures were "too draughty" and made him "turn up my coat collar" for fear of catching cold. Furthermore, he referred to the impressionists mockingly as 'the landscapists', and claimed an urge to want to fire at them in the countryside, he told Andre Gide in 1909. "Bang! Bang! There should be a police force for that purpose," he said. 

So while they battled mosquitoes and sunstroke in pastoral settings, Degas stuck to his attic studio like a hermit: "I can get along very well without ever going out of my own house," Degas would say. "With a bowl of soup and three old brushes you can make the finest landscape ever painted." Yet he didn't care much for colour either, preferring black and white. Economy of colour and speech, was a Degas trademark. Observing the Japanese Exhibition in 1890 at the Beaux-Arts, he's as pinpoint as his artistic technique: "Alas! Alas! Taste everywhere!"

Degas, contrary to the commonly held belief that his paintings - like photography - captured only fragmented scenes in daily life, resisted the urge to capture 'the moment'. He once said: “No art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the Great Masters." 

And so it was. Degas' feeling for the modern aesthetic was rooted in a robust sense of artistic tradition. Discussing a red-chalk drawing of a hand he'd purchased by Ingres, here's Degas: "Look at those fingernails, see how they are rendered. That is my ideal of genius, a man who finds a hand so lovely, so wonderful, so difficult to render, that he will shut himself away, content to do nothing but indicate fingernails."

Such obsession accords with Degas penchant for the gestures of individuals absorbed in a particular task - the recurring pose of a ballet dancer tying her slipper, for example. Degas it seems, struggled with the opposition in his work between the contained and the expressive. Don't look for story in a Degas painting, there isn't one, yet each canvas presents the syntax of artistic technique. 

To those who called him the painter of the "ballet rats", Degas said later in life: "People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes." Never a truer word was spoke. For memorable paintings of fleshed-out, full-blooded dancing girls look no further than Degas' contemporary Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who celebrated dancing's glamour and its characters, not its geometry and calculus. Degas, at times, can feel as much number cruncher as creative spirit, more spreadsheet than starving artist, the latter of which, he never was.

"If one wants to be a serious artist today and create a little niche, one must immerse oneself in solitude. There is too much tittle-tattle. It is as if paintings were made - like speculations on the stock markets - out of the friction among people eager for gain. All this trading sharpens your mind and falsifies your judgement." So wrote Degas, at the tender age of 22, in 1856. It would be another 22 years before he first exhibited La danseuse a la robe de tulle, (pictured) at the World's Fair in 1878. It was, somewhat remarkably, the only sculptural work shown during his lifetime. Pierre-Auguste Renoir called Degas the best sculptor in Paris on account of the little dancer, recalls art dealer Ambrose Vollard, on the very day that Rodin sold The Thinker and the Gates of Hell to a private collector in Paris.  

Degas had a private income, and became a high-powered collector (little known to many of his contemporaries) building a veritable art inventory at his home at 6 Boulevard de Clichy in Paris. He acquired Ingres and Delacroix, El Greco and Van Gogh, David and Cezanne, Manet, Millet and Mary Cassatt, among others, mostly from Vollard. At an auction of his collection in 1918, one year after Degas' death, Manet's Grand portrait de familie was withdrawn after the Louvre purchased it for 400,000 French francs. An article in Le Monde by year's end claimed that proceeds from the sales of Degas' collection had surpassed 12 million French francs. Proof that no artist had such an eye and ear for movement, be it art or the stock market's, as the spectacular and speculative Monsieur Degas.

Degas, Figures in Motion showcases 74 bronze sculptures never before shown in Asia, supported by the French Consulate General of France in Hong Kong & Macau through the Le French May at MGM Art Space, MGM Macau, until November 20, 2016. Opening hours: 12pm-9pm, closed on Mondays (except public holidays). Free admission.

Image: The Little Fourteen Year Old Dancer. The M.T. Abraham Foundation for the Visual Arts © All Rights Reserved.