The Fitzwilliam Museum celebrates the centenary of the death of Edgar Degas

In the centenary year of the artist’s death, the Fitzwilliam Museum is staging a major exhibition of its wide-ranging holdings of works by Edgar Degas (1834-1917), the most extensive and representative in the UK. The Museum’s collections have been complemented by an outstanding group of over fifty loans from private and public collections throughout Europe and the United States, several of which are on public display for the first time. These include a group of paintings and drawings once belonging to the economist John Maynard Keynes, bought directly in 1918 and 1919 from Degas’s posthumous studio sales in Paris, against a backdrop of German bombardment during World War I. The remarkable breadth of works on display includes paintings, sculpture, drawings, pastels, etchings, monotypes, counterproofs and letters – some business-like, some heartrending – written by Degas to friends and associates. Prominen