Edgar Degas was a French artist considered one of the founders of Impressionism, although he called himself a realist. Degas began his artistic career as a history painter, with an academic background and studied classical art, but in his thirties he decided to change his style. He combined the traditional methods learned with more contemporary topics. He was said to be a classical painter of modern life. Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement, founded due to opposition and harsh criticism from the mainstream art community in France. Impressionist works are characterized by open composition, realistic depiction of light, small but visible brushstrokes, movement, and elements of the human experience. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The Impressionists went against the conventions of art society to depict real life and not mythology. Degas was an impressionist and encompassed all these characteristics in this work of art. In his oil painting, Place de la Concorde 1875, he recognizes the traditions and conventions of classical art, but adapts to them. The painting depicts Ludovic Napoléon Lepic smoking a cigar and his daughters walking their dog. The family is depicted with dull and empty faces and does not appear to interact with each other. The positioning of the family is bizarre as they are all facing, moving and looking in all different directions, this composition gives off a sense of isolation. Degas further explores this isolation with the amount of negative space painted, with the large empty square in the background and only four figures in the foreground. Degas is known for depicting human isolation in his paintings through figures and composition, but this is mostly shown in his portraits. Degas was a keen photographer in his later years, his passion for photography strongly influencing his painting Place de la Concorde. The painting as a whole looks as if it has been cropped. The man in the left corner has been cropped in half, and Lepic, his daughters, and his dog have all been cropped so that the lower half of their bodies are not shown, as are the building and carriage at horses cut off. In traditional classical paintings this would not be the case, everything would be shown as a whole or not at all. There has always been a long tradition of the female nude depicted as modest and sensual. This tradition dates back to the ancient Greeks and Romans in sculptures such as that of the goddess Venus modestly covering her body after bathing. Dr. Steven Tucker, spokesperson for Khan Academy, says women have always been portrayed as "dressed in mythology or dressed in pure beauty." Édouard Manet's Olympia is modeled after Titian's Venus of Urbino, but removes the conventional approach of representing space and body position, and also strips away the mask of mythology behind the Venus and women depicted only as that of Venus . Édouard Manet's Olympia draws on this convention but also does something radical and modern for the Classical and Renaissance periods. The woman depicted, Olympia, is not represented as a Venus or a goddess but as a real woman in a real Parisian apartment, she stripped away the facade of women as mythical perfect human beings. Olympia is not painted to look perfect, her face is asymmetrical and her lips are too thin. Manet painted a dark black outline around her body, this made her look almost dirty and with a patchy complexion. During this time, in 1863, the concept of real women being painted was.