Perhaps because of the blurry lines, and the dream-like feeling of many Impressionist paintings, a great deal of attention has been given to Impressionism in selling products for children. Museum gift shops, toy stores and book stores all sell Impressionist products aimed at children. Some of the many things sold are lunchboxes, card games, puzzles, mugs, pillows, dolls and books. Since it seems that almost every young girl takes ballet lessons at some time in her life, books about Degas and his paintings of dancers are especially popular.
Bijou, Bonbon & Beau by Joan Sweeney is one such book. It adds another aspect that attracts young children as well: kittens. In it, a cat, searching for a place to stay, finds her way to the ballet theater in Paris. There she gives birth to three kittens: Bijou, Bonbon and Beau. Everyone involved in the ballet productions stops by to visit the kittens: the musicians, stagehands and ballerinas, even the artist who comes to sketch them. The antagonist of the story is Armand Klenk, the stage manager, who wants to get rid of the kittens, but is persuaded by the calm, friendly artist to let them stay. On opening night, the kittens make their way onto stage and dance along with the ballerinas. Klenk is furious, but the 
dancing kittens make everyone in Paris want to buy a ticket to the ballet. Klenk allows them to stay, as long as they don't interrupt a performance again.
Throughout the story, Degas' name is not mentioned. While all the action is going on onstage, he sits in the theater and quietly sketches the dancers. However, he becomes the hero of the story when he convinces Klenk to let them stay. Klenk listens to Degas because he knows that his paintings of dancers make more people buy tickets. The quiet artist who sketches the dancers and makes such influential paintings is mysterious throughout the story, however, at the end of the book, the reader finds out who he is. A short paragraph about Degas and Impressionism appears at the end. By attracting children's attention with kittens and ballet, they become eager to learn about the artist who saved the kittens and learn about Impressionism as well. This book, and others like it teach children at a young age to have an appreciation for art, and the artists, like Degas, who create it. By why do children's books never portray Degas as a photographer? - It must be because his work as a photographer was too brief and insignificant.
Sweeney, Joan. Bijou,Bonbon & Beau. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998.
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The majority of Degas' other photographs are portraits of family and friends. This was the standard subject of photographs at the time. Degas usually photographed the people he was close to in the evening when he visited with them. Several of Degas' photographs are of the Halévy family. Others are of Auguste Renoir and Julie Manet. Degas also photographed many self-portraits. Pictures of this kind were most likely for personal use. None of Degas' other photographs were replicated so exactly in his paintings as those of dancers. The only other subject of Degas' remaining photographs that also appeared in his paintings is bathers. Unlike the photographs of dancers, however, these photographs are of better quality and don't seem to have been used merely as an aid to painting.
He accomplished in 1814 this using a camera obscura, a large darkened room into which a person would enter, and could view an inverted image of light that passed through a lens or small opening on one side of the room and was projected onto the opposite wall. His image required 8 hours of exposure and eventually faded. Niépce then began experimenting with Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre to find a way to make the captured image permanent. After Niépce's death, in 1837, Daguerre developed the daguerreotype, a more practical method of photography. He found a way to fix the image on paper and it only required 30 minutes of exposure.
In 1851, Frederick Scott Archer made advancements to photography in his invention of the collodion process, which only required 2 to 3 seconds of exposure. This process used a glass negative that had to be exposed while wet.
My name is Morgan Alonso and I am a member of the Princeton University class of 2008. I am currently living in a dorm room in the fabulous Butler College in Princeton, New Jersey; however, my true home is in Miami, Florida, where I will be returning in less than two weeks. The weather here has been much too cold and gray, and I am looking forward to get home to warm, blue skies. I absolutely LOVE the sun and can't wait to go to the beach. I attended 
id not need photography to accomplish this lofty goal. Degas perception was so great that he could capture more through sketches than with photographs. For this reason, Degas only photographed for a few months in 1895 (Kendall 56) and put down the lens almost as quickly as he picked it up. The photographs Degas took of dancers fell short of his expectations. For this reason, he tucked away the three yellow and orange glass negatives of dancers in his studio, where they were not discovered until after his death.
As the photographs did not achieve the desired effects, Degas quickly returned to using sketching as an aid, allowing him to create lifelike paintings once again. Even the name given to the sketch Two Dancers Resting suggests the more casual positions they occupy. The dancers are no longer uncomfortably posing for a photograph as they were in Four Dancers and Dancers in Blue, but take up a relaxed, seated position. These life-like positions were achieved as a result of Degas' extensive and perceptive studies. Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall, authors of Degas and the Dance write "his erudite and precisely inscribed studies of ballet steps, arm and hand movements and the role of mime have few historical rivals" (Kendall 177). Degas sketched dancers so many times that he was able to accurately alter their positions between sketches and the final paintings. 
In Two Dancers Resting, one dancer reaches over her body to tie her shoe while the other rests her head on her hand. Degas modeled the painting Two Dancers after this sketch, but he has altered their positions slightly, a task he could not have achieved through photography. Now the dancer on the left reaches over with both hands to tie her shoe and the dancer on the right stretches one arm over her head. Degas has mastered the contortions of the dancers bodies. Their backs are curved to the perfect degree that makes the dancers appear comfortable and natural. 
Degas reaches the peak of his lifelike portrayal of dancers' postures in one of his final masterpieces, Dancers at the Barre. Here he depicts two dancers stretching. The dancer in front, on the right has one leg extended and raised to the height of the bar. She stretches over and touches her ankle. As in Two Dancers, her back is curved in a lifelike manner. This time, however, the posture is more complicated because the dancers are standing rather than sitting. Moreover, they are balancing on only one leg. This pose has the potential to show a great deal of instability, but Degas succeeds in demonstrating the dancers magnificent sense of poise. While photography did not help him achieve this feat, he could not have created such lifelike paintings without the use of sketches.]]>
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Small was referring to the fact that a photograph is a physical thing, unlike a memory, that can be saved and looked at over and over. The attraction of photography was to be able to capture onto a piece of paper the image of a single moment that could not be isolated in memory. Degas hoped to capture a dancer in ways that he was unable to through his sketches such as in mid air during a leap across stage. However, early cameras did not have the same technology they do today: shutter speed was so slow that subjects sometimes had to hold still for several minutes before the exposure was complete (Daniel 13). Photography could not capture an image of a dancer at the peak of her instability because this instant did not last long nearly long enough. Instead of capturing a dancer in mid-motion or at the peak of her instability, he composed the three photographs found in his studio very carefully and had his subject stand in three different poses. The pose in each picture, all taken 1895, gives them the names by which they are referred to today: Dancer (Arm Outstretched), Dancer (Adjusting Her Shoulder Strap) and Dancer (Adjusting Both Shoulder Straps). These poses were not arbitrary, but specific. Degas took these photographs with a goal in mind: he wanted to use the dancer's poses as references to create a future masterpiece.
Specifically, the three poses seen in these photographs can be clearly seen in two of Degas later works: Dancers in Blue (1898) and Four Dancers (1899). Degas used each photograph as a reference and combined all three poses into two different compositions (Daniel 43). These paintings show four dancers in different postures, all true to real life. Particular attention in these works is paid to the woman's back. Her neck, collarbone and fingers are clearly defined. However, unlike the dancers in The Dancing Lesson, these dancers are not composed in a lifelike setting. The positions they stand in do not seem very natural. Due to the long shutter speed, the pictures could not be taken at a single moment during rehearsal. The dancer had to pose purposely for each photograph, and it shows. In these paintings, Degas did manage to compose the figures into an aesthetically pleasing composition. However, this was not achieved through photography. In looking at Four Dancers, Half-Studies, it is clear that Degas made sketches of the dancers even after he photographed them. In this sketch, he combined the photographed poses together in order to see how they would look on canvas. Degas could not have combined four different postures by one dancer through photography alone.
Four dancers practice their poses in the background while three others stretch on a bench in the foreground. The second dancer from the right, seated on the bench, with her leg outstretched is the most detailed, and her posture draws the viewer's attention the most. Degas has frozen her movements in a single moment. She leans slightly forward, points her toe and pulls down her costume with her hands. Degas has captured her position at a rather unstable moment. It is unlikely that this dancer would have sat for a long period of time in this manner, but Degas has managed to portray this posture in a very lifelike manner. Her pose appears perfectly comfortable and natural. In order to capture this pose with such accurate resemblance to real life, Degas executed several sketches of this model, such as Dancer Pulling up her Tights. He combined several aspects of different sketches to create the effect of this dancer being frozen in time, without appearing stuck in an awkward position. Hundreds of sketches were done to duplicate the postures of all of the dancers on the canvas (Kendall 111). By observing his subject for such extended periods of time and executing so many sketches, Degas was able to record their postures not only on paper, but in his memory as well. This careful observation and practice is what allowed Degas to be so successful in creating magnificent, lifelike scenes of dancers at any time, before, during, and after performances.