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50 free Edgar Degas trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Edgar Degas organised the Impressionist exhibitions and hated being called an Impressionist. He never painted outdoors, joked about shooting landscapists with bird-shot, and spent his life drawing dancers, laundresses, jockeys and bathers from memory in a Paris studio, growing blinder and more bitter every year. These 50 questions cover the life and the work: the banker father who wanted a lawyer, the Creole mother from New Orleans, Ingres's advice about lines, the Bellelli Family begun in Naples, and the brother whose debts turned a rich amateur into a professional. You will get the Little Dancer in wax with real hair, the bronze that sold for 13 million pounds, L'Absinthe's models and its London scandal, The Ballet Class and its silver-haired master, and the long friendship and falling-out with Mary Cassatt. Easy questions cover dancers, pastel and Paris; the hard tier asks about foundries, the Abadie trial, Jean-Baptiste Faure and the only painting a museum bought while he lived. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which subject appears in more than half of Degas's works?
Dancers
Ballet pictures sold well and paid the family debts his brother René ran up.
Q 02What did Degas prefer to be called instead of an Impressionist?
A realist
He mocked colleagues for painting outdoors and joked about gendarmes with bird-shot for landscapists.
Q 03In which city was Degas born in 1834?
Paris
His mother was a Creole from New Orleans and his father a banker.
Q 04Which American city did Degas's Creole mother come from?
New Orleans
Her father Germain Musson was born in Port-au-Prince and settled there in 1810.
Q 05Which master told the young Degas to 'draw lines, young man, and still more lines'?
Ingres
They met in 1855, the year Degas entered the École des Beaux-Arts.
Q 06What did Degas's father expect him to study after the lycée?
Law
He enrolled at the Faculty of Law in 1853 and applied little effort.
Q 07Which early masterpiece portrays Degas's aunt, her husband and their two daughters?
The Bellelli Family
Begun in Naples in 1858, it was not finished until 1867 and hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.
Q 08In which Italian city was the exiled Baron Bellelli living when Degas painted his family?
Florence
Laura Bellelli wears mourning for her father, shown in the framed portrait behind her.
Q 09Which painter did Degas reportedly meet in 1864, both copying a Velázquez in the Louvre?
Édouard Manet
Manet's example pushed Degas from history painting to modern subjects.
Q 10During which war did Degas enlist in the National Guard and find his eyesight defective?
Franco-Prussian War
Rifle training revealed the problem; his eyes worried him for the rest of his life.
Q 11Which Degas painting was the only work a museum bought in his lifetime?
A Cotton Office in New Orleans
The museum in Pau acquired it; he painted it while staying on Esplanade Avenue in 1872–73.
Q 12Whose business debts forced Degas to sell his house and inherited art collection in 1874?
His brother René's
Dependent on sales for the first time, he produced much of his greatest work in the next decade.
Q 13How many of the eight Impressionist Exhibitions did Degas show in?
Seven
He organised them despite constant conflicts and insisted on including non-Impressionists like Forain.
Q 21Which actress, also painted by Manet, modelled the woman in L'Absinthe?
Ellen Andrée
The man is painter-etcher Marcellin Desboutin; the café is the Nouvelle-Athènes.
Q 22In which Paris café is L'Absinthe set?
Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes
English critics in 1893 read the picture as a warning against absinthe and the French.
Q 23Which museum holds L'Absinthe?
Musée d'Orsay
George Moore's first reaction to the woman was 'What a whore!', which he later regretted.
Q 14How old was the dancer in the title of the only sculpture Degas exhibited in his lifetime?
Fourteen
Shown in 1881 in wax with real hair and a cloth tutu, it was called both revolutionary and ugly.
Q 15Who was the Belgian ballet student who modelled for Degas's famous wax dancer?
Marie van Goethem
She studied at the Paris Opera Ballet school; critics compared her to a monkey.
Q 16In what material did Degas originally sculpt the Little Dancer?
Wax
It was two-thirds life size and dressed in a real bodice, tutu and slippers.
Q 17Which foundry cast the Degas bronzes after his death, from 1919 to 1936?
Hébrard
It judged 74 of the 150 waxes found in his studio fit for casting.
Q 18For how much did a Little Dancer bronze sell at Sotheby's in February 2009?
£13.3 million
The seller, Auto Trader founder John Madejski, said he had bought it by accident.
Q 19At which sixth Impressionist exhibition year did the Little Dancer first appear?
1881
Huysmans called it 'the first truly modern attempt at sculpture I know'.
Q 20What was the original title of the painting now known as L'Absinthe?
Dans un Café
It became L'Absinthe only when shown in London in 1893, where it was called degraded.
Q 24Which silver-haired ballet master leads the lesson in The Ballet Class?
Jules Perrot
He and Mérante were the last survivors of the romantic ballet era at the Paris Opéra.
Q 25Which composer commissioned The Ballet Class?
Jean-Baptiste Faure
The famous baritone-composer was a major collector of Manet and Degas.
Q 26Which American painter did Degas invite to show with the Impressionists in 1877?
Mary Cassatt
He had admired her portrait Ida at the 1874 Salon; both stayed single and clashed over Dreyfus.
Q 27In which Pennsylvania town, now part of Pittsburgh, was Degas's American friend born?
Allegheny
Cassatt helped sell Degas's work in America and he introduced her to pastel and engraving.
Q 28How did Cassatt describe Degas's portrait of her holding cards?
As a repugnant person
She sold it and told Durand-Ruel she did not want it known she had posed.
Q 29Which scandal brought out Degas's antisemitism and cost him his Jewish friends?
The Dreyfus Affair
He remained an outspoken Anti-Dreyfusard until his death in 1917.
Q 30Which dry medium did Degas master by the late 1870s, layering it in complex textures?
Pastel
It let him reconcile his gift for line with a growing interest in colour.