Edgar Degas painted ballerinas with such grace and intimacy that the public assumed he loved them. He did not. Degas was a misanthrope who alienated nearly every friend he had, made anti-Semitic remarks during the Dreyfus Affair that cost him his closest relationships, and grew increasingly bitter and reclusive as his eyesight failed. The beauty of his art and the ugliness of his personality are impossible to reconcile — which is exactly what makes him one of the most fascinating figures in art history.

This episode traces Degas from his aristocratic banking family through the Impressionist exhibitions he helped organize, the ballet paintings that defined his reputation, and the lonely, blind final years spent touching wax sculptures he could no longer see.

• Degas’s wealthy origins and his early ambition to be a history painter in the classical tradition
• The Impressionist exhibitions and the ballet paintings that made him famous for the wrong reasons
• The Dreyfus Affair anti-Semitism and the friendships it destroyed
• The failing eyesight, the shift to sculpture, and the reclusive final decades