Edgar Degas had limited formal training in painting, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris for a year before he went to Italy for three years from the summer of 1856. On his return to Paris, where he set up his first studio in 1859, he followed convention and worked mainly in oils.

Degas painted some small portraits early in his career, but his first major work is that of The Bellelli Family, which he laboured over for nearly ten years between 1858-67. He started this when he was staying with the family in Naples.

He also made several landscape sketches, some in oil on paper, others like this View of Naples (1860) in watercolour. None seems to have been developed into anything more substantial, though.

In the summer of 1869 he travelled to the Normandy coast of France, where he visited Édouard Manet and painted some landscapes in pastels. Among those is Beach at Low Tide (c 1869-70) emphasising its flatness and emptiness. He then seems to have become more experimental in his technique, for example wetting his pastels to apply them with a brush, and combining them with print-making techniques he had been teaching himself. Among his goals seems to have been to reduce the amount of binder in his paint in a bid to apply pure colour.

From the mid-1870s in his paintings of the Ballet at the Paris Opéra, here from 1877, Degas experimented with another method of reducing the binder in his paint layer, by applying pastel over a monotype. He first created this painting on a non-absorbent surface, and while that was still wet used that to make a print on paper, which he completed by applying soft pastel on top.

As his ballet paintings progressed to smaller groups, they focussed more on their form and movement, as in Danseuse basculant (Danseuse verte) (Swaying Dancer, Dancer in Green) (1877-79). This is painted in a combination of pastel and gouache. By this time he had experimented technically in three main areas: the use of peinture à l’essence, oil paint with the drying oil largely removed, a rich variety of wet and dry techniques with soft pastels, and print-making, in particular his re-introduction of the monotype.

Degas’ Portrait of Edmond Duranty (1879) was unusually painted in gouache with pastel on linen. His friend Duranty is clearly thinking over his next piece of writing, which could have been as influential as his essay The New Painting, published in 1876, often used as a benchmark against which to compare Degas’ work.

This pastel painting of a Woman Having Her Hair Combed from about 1885 shows some of the textures he created using his techniques, from smooth flesh to the frizz of hair.

This later period of his work also brought an increasing number of paintings of women bathing and dressing, culminating in pastel paintings formed from vigorous vertical or diagonal strokes, such as Woman Sponging Her Back (c 1888-92). The contrast with the previous work is stark.

Degas’ late landscapes are based on similar combinations of media, as in his Wheat Field and Green Hill from the early 1890s, in which he applied soft pastels on a monotype using oil-based ink or paint.

His remarkable composite work, made using peinture à l’essence, of a Dancer Fastening Her Shoe (c 1893-98), brings together four different views of the same dancer fastening her left shoe. This may have been inspired by Muybridge and Marey’s composite photos of human motion, and may well have reflected his own experiments in photography.

Degas’ gelatin silver photographic print of After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Back from 1896 is one example of his many experiments with photography.

Most of the other more orthodox French Impressionists were remarkably conservative in their choice and use of media, sticking to oil on canvas for almost their entire careers. Degas was the odd man out, not just for what he painted, but for how he did so.

Scissors, including shears, are hand tools use for cutting by bringing two cutting edges to bear on the sheet or object being cut. Originally they were all shears, effectively hinged at the end further from the blades, when open like a V. They have been largely replaced by scissors that rotate around a pivot between their handles and blades, when open like an X. However, in normal usage terminology is inconsistent, with heavyweight X-based scissors used in gardening and horticulture being referred to as shears. Scissors weren’t made in large numbers until the later half of the eighteenth century, since when they have become widely used.

In this article I will ignore farming and industrial uses of shears, for example to harvest wool from sheep or cut sheet metal (also known as snips), and concentrate more on domestic uses of lightweight shears and scissors. These are most strongly associated with cutting fabrics, yarn and threads, and all forms of fibre craft.

In classical myth, they appear in the weaving contest between Arachne and the goddess Minerva.

Several of the surviving paintings of this myth show Arachne and Minerva at their looms, weaving like fury. Francesco del Cossa’s The Triumph of Minerva (1467-70) was chosen for the month of March in his fresco for the Room of the Months in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy. The trio of women in the foreground are engaged in allied crafts, including embroidery and sewing, and the middle one is using a pair of shears to cut some fabric. Behind them are the two weavers working at what is shown as a single loom, the traditional boxwood shuttle just being inserted by the left hand of the woman at the right.

The three Fates are often depicted with one of them, traditionally Atropos, cutting the thread of life using shears.

Edward Burne-Jones’ painting of The Feast of Peleus from 1872-81 uses a composition based on classical representations of the Last Supper. Every head has turned towards Eris (Discord) as she brings her golden apple, apart from that of the centaur behind her right wing. Even the three Fates, seen in the left foreground with the nude Atropos wielding her shears, have for once paused momentarily in their work.

This Salon-style depiction of the Fates by Paul Thumann from about 1880 became extremely popular throughout Europe, and was often reproduced on mass-produced porcelain. It’s unusual for drawing such marked distinctions between the women: Atropos, on the left, is shown as a morose older woman armed with her shears; Clotho stands to weave, and is young, very pretty, and bare down to the waist; Lachesis is modestly dressed and holding sprigs of vegetation, at the right.

This transferred into Walter Crane’s unique allegorical narrative The Bridge of Life from 1884. Below the right end of the bridge, Atropos is seen as she is just about to cut the thread of life, so bringing death.

The Old Testament story of Samson depends on him losing his prodigious strength when his hair is cut off by the seductress Delilah.

William Blake’s Samson Subdued is one of the large series of biblical watercolours he painted for Thomas Butts in around 1800-03. It shows the naked figure of Delilah holding a pair of modern scissors in her left hand, having apparently cut Samson’s hair off with them to destroy his strength.

Although by no means universal, they are also used as a sign of the Virgin Mary’s domestic activity at the time of the Annunciation, where X-based scissors might also be a symbol of the Crucifixion to come.

Oleksandr Murashko’s breathtaking Annunciation, painted probably in 1907-08 or 1909, captures her at work on a tapestry, with a pair of scissors and thread on the carpet in the right foreground.

Jacek Malczewski’s Mary (right) is a modern young woman of 1923, whose thimble and scissors rest on a bare wooden table behind. Gabriel is in the midst of breaking the news to her, his hands held together as he speaks.

Many other paintings include scissors as a reference to their domestic use.

In Edgar Degas’ Interior (1868-9), also known as The Interior and even The Rape, they may be one of the clues to its reading. Between the man and woman, and just behind her, is a small occasional table, on which there’s a table-lamp and a small open suitcase. Some of the contents of the suitcase rest over its edge. In front of it, on the table top, is a pair of scissors and other items that appear to be from a clothing repair kit or ‘housewife’, indicating she has travelled away from her home to this meeting.

James Tissot painted The Farewells soon after his flight to London in the summer of 1871. This couple, separated by the iron rails of a closed gate, are in late eighteenth century dress. The man stares intently at the woman, his gloved left hand resting on the spikes along the top of the gate, and his ungloved right hand grasps her left. She plays idly with her clothing with her other hand, and looks down, towards their hands. She is plainly dressed with a pair of scissors suspended by string on her left side, implying she may be a governess.

These two young milliners in Paul Signac’s Les Modistes (Two Milliners in the Rue du Caire, Paris), from 1885-86, are busy making fashionable hats. The nearer of the two women is bent down retrieving her scissors as a symbol of her craft.

The Norwegian artist Christian Krohg’s Tired from 1885 shows an exhausted seamstress, one of the many thousands working at home at that time, toiling for long hours by lamplight for a pittance. On the table in front of her is a small pair of scissors.

Moritz Stifter’s The New Dress from 1889 shows a scene set in the dressmaker’s, with a pair of scissors resting between fabric on the table at the right.

My last pair of scissors appears as part of the sewing kit on the table of Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s painting of Kit’s Writing Lesson (1852), showing a less than memorable scene from Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, with its elaborately detailed interior.

Many notable painters have also made their own prints, and the two arts have informed one another. We’ve seen this most recently in the paintings of Félix Vallotton, where his late works have become simplified in the way that’s often used when making successful prints. A few artists have gone one step further and produced images that combine both techniques, where their work consists of a painted print.

Most forms of printmaking involve the production of a plate of metal or wood in which cuts or marks are made. The surface is then covered in printing ink, and the paper (or other medium) is then pressed against that to transfer patterns of ink onto it. Monotypes are different in that the plate remains intact, and the image to be printed is formed on its surface before making a single impression from it. As with most types of printmaking, there are many variations.

In 1794, William Blake had perfected his colour illuminated printing process, in publishing a series of illuminated books, and the following year he used it to produce a limited run of twelve large colour paintings. These formed the first major collection of paintings he offered for sale: one mark of the importance that he accorded them was his use of the term fresco to describe their medium.

In fact, they weren’t made using a technique that resembled fresco painting at all. Although there remains some debate as to exactly what he did, the process was probably:

1. Develop the work using sketches, etc., until a design was ready to print. In some cases, these large prints were derived from earlier work, in others he made fresh sketches.
2. Draw the finished work onto a sheet of thick millboard, ready to colour.
3. Produce a wet watercolour, using pigment, binder, and a honey additive, on the millboard.
4. Print approximately three copies from the millboard ‘plate’.
5. Touch up each print by hand using pen and ink and watercolour to produce the finished painting.

Although it’s possible he may have used oil-based inks or paints on some, Blake’s lifelong aversion to the use of oil paints suggests that he used water-based media throughout, and analyses support that. These ‘large prints’ (also known as his Lambeth Prints, as that is where they were made) are therefore watercolour monotypes then individually retouched and painted further. Given the variation between the different ‘pulls’ or impressions made of each, they are less prints and more print-based paintings.

Neither were they illustrations in the way that the images within his illuminated books may be. They were supplied as individual sheets for mounting and framing as paintings. We don’t know whether Blake intended them to be viewed in pairs, groups, or as a complete set of twelve, and there’s uncertainty as to his own title for several. Indeed, some of them appear to have been mistitled following Blake’s death, and that has led to confusion as to what they actually depict.

Satan Exulting over Eve (c 1795) is thought to be the first impression of this work, with roots in the story of the Fall in Genesis, and in Milton’s Paradise Lost. In book 5 (lines 28-92), Milton writes a more detailed account of the Fall, in which Eve has a dream of Satan giving her the fateful apple, sweeping her up into the cloud before she sinks down and falls asleep. Blake shows Satan flying low over the sleeping body of Eve; he carries a shield and spear. The serpent has already coiled itself around Eve’s legs and body, and there is an apple by her right hand.

Newton (1795–c 1805), another first impression, is one of Blake’s most famous images. It shows the brilliant mathematician and physicist completely absorbed in a geometrical problem, oblivious to the wondrous rock on which he sits. Its standard interpretation is that Newton’s scientific rationalism was inadequate without imagination and the creativity of the artist, a surprisingly negative view of the man who is still considered a towering genius.

The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy (c 1795) has proved the most enigmatic of all the dozen paintings to read. For a long time, it was believed to show Hecate, as proposed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It’s more likely that the woman seen at the front of the figures is from Blake’s own mythology, Enitharmon: partner, twin, and inspiration to Los (and mother of Orc). She represents spiritual beauty, and was modelled on Blake’s wife, Catherine (who may have been the model for her figure here too). In her ‘night of joy’, she establishes her Woman’s World, with a false religion of chastity and vengeance – which was Blake’s view of the 1800 year history of the ‘official’ Christian church.

Blake’s Christ Appearing to His Disciples/Apostles After the Resurrection refers to the gospel of Luke, chapter 24 verses 36-40:
And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, “Peace be unto you.” But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit. And he said unto them, “Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his feet.

Edgar Degas’ monotypes are thought to have been more conventional, made on a lightweight aluminium sheet using oil-based printing ink, then extensively retouched and painted, often using soft pastels.

During the late 1870s, Degas devoted series of monotypes to women’s ‘toilet’ preparations, of which Intimacy from about 1877 is an example. He appears to have been fascinated at the craft and care used to prepare a woman for public viewing, something a single man who had no known amorous relationships would find quite strange. This print appears to have undergone retouching and modification, but hasn’t been painted using pigment or colours.

The same year Degas applied soft pastel to the print, in the Ballet at the Paris Opéra (1877), which more closely resembles a true painting.

Also dating from 1876-77 is his Woman Drying Herself after the Bath, one his first works showing a woman bathing. It’s also one of the few in this series setting the woman in a broader context, here a plain and simple bedroom with a single bed. The woman, wearing only bright red ‘mule’ slippers, stands just behind the shallow metal tub, watching herself in the mirror of her dressing table, as she dries her body with a towel. On its shelf is a small range of cosmetics, with the mandatory mirror behind. This too is the result of applying pastels to a monotype.

Degas’ late landscapes are based on the same combination of media, as shown in his Landscape above, and Wheat Field and Green Hill below, both from the early 1890s.

The American Impressionist Mary Cassatt learned her printmaking techniques with Degas, so it’s not surprising to see some of her monotypes forming the basis of paintings.

For her Feeding the Ducks from about 1894 she combined a mature use of drypoint with aquatint, to which she added monotype using oil-based inks. In drypoint, the plate is scratched to form lines with the raised burrs that result. This was most probably produced by applying a fine acid-resistant powder such as rosin to form the ‘ground’, etching it in acid, then applying drypoint lines before printing using oil-based ink.

These techniques were developed further and became more popular in the twentieth century, in the work of artists such as Marc Chagall from the 1960s.