A Draftsman Who Turned More and More to Dynamism- NYTimes
"Degas was an end and a beginning, a bridge between the neo-classicism of his teacher’s teacher, Ingres, and the painting of modern life by that scruffy band of outsiders known as the Impressionists. He was a draftsman of preternatural gifts, the last major artist in a line going back to Giotto to make exacting delineation of the real world a central drive. But in his acute attention to empirical experience, stripped bare of the academic apparatus of myth, historicism and moralizing, he also was a quintessentially modern man."