<P> Degas's mature style is distinguished by conspicuously unfinished passages, even in otherwise tightly rendered paintings . He frequently blamed his eye troubles for his inability to finish, an explanation that met with some skepticism from colleagues and collectors who reasoned, as Stuckey explains, that "his pictures could hardly have been executed by anyone with inadequate vision". The artist provided another clue when he described his predilection "to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them", and was in any case notoriously reluctant to consider a painting complete . </P> <P> His interest in portraiture led Degas to study carefully the ways in which a person's social stature or form of employment may be revealed by their physiognomy, posture, dress, and other attributes . In his 1879 Portraits, At the Stock Exchange, he portrayed a group of Jewish businessmen with a hint of anti-Semitism . In 1881 he exhibited two pastels, Criminal Physiognomies, that depicted juvenile gang members recently convicted of murder in the "Abadie Affair". Degas had attended their trial with sketchbook in hand, and his numerous drawings of the defendants reveal his interest in the atavistic features thought by some 19th - century scientists to be evidence of innate criminality . In his paintings of dancers and laundresses, he reveals their occupations not only by their dress and activities but also by their body type: his ballerinas exhibit an athletic physicality, while his laundresses are heavy and solid . </P> <P> By the later 1870s Degas had mastered not only the traditional medium of oil on canvas, but pastel as well . The dry medium, which he applied in complex layers and textures, enabled him more easily to reconcile his facility for line with a growing interest in expressive color . </P> <P> In the mid-1870s he also returned to the medium of etching, which he had neglected for ten years . At first he was guided in this by his old friend Ludovic - Napoléon Lepic, himself an innovator in its use, and began experimenting with lithography and monotype . </P>

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