Edgar Degas is positioned at the center of Impressionism, yet he loathed the term, mocked painters who worked outdoors, and considered himself a realist. This episode uncovers the man behind the ballet dancers: born in Paris in 1834 to a wealthy banker, he abandoned law school for a room turned studio, registered as a copyist at the Louvre, absorbed Ingres's advice to draw lines obsessively, and studied the Renaissance masters in Italy while fixating on overlooked background figures rather than heroes.

We follow the compounding tragedies that reshaped his art: the discovery of a degenerative eye condition during rifle practice in the Franco-Prussian War, a visit to New Orleans that produced A Cotton Office, the only painting a museum bought in his lifetime, and the 1874 death of his father, which exposed his brother's ruinous debts and forc ...