A man of many talents, Edgar Degas was a famous French Impressionist painter who depicted the Parisian life in beautiful images. Edgar had a fascination for human figures and many of his paintings featured dancers in unusual positions. During his course at École des Beaux-Arts, which was a popular art school in France, he spent three years travelling in Italy where he studied and copied the arts of Da Vinci and Michelangelo. After he returned to Paris, he started making portraits; however his innovation with techniques did not go well with Salon, a group of powerful artists who presided over art exhibitions. In the next few years, Edgar was part of a group of avant-garde artists who dwelled on how painters could take a modern approach to art. With the outbreak of Franco-Prussian War, Edgar enrolled as a National Guard. But, he escaped much of the bloodbath that followed for the establishment of the Third Republic by travelling to New Orleans. After he returned to Paris, Edgar along with his fellow avant-garde artists formed the Society of Independent Artists, a group which aimed to exhibit their art without the control of Salon. This group came to be known as ‘Impressionists’ for their style of art, although Degas himself was more comfortable with the term ‘Realist’ or Independent’.