Ballet Dancers Rehearsing

Always captivated by gesture and motion, in the 1870s Edgar Degas became interested in ballet dancers and particularly in the youngest ballerinas of the corps. During frequent visits to Paris's ballet school, he found what interested him most: movement--not free and spontaneous action but precise exercises. On this crowded sheet, one dancer practices at the bar in the upper left with her back toward the viewer, while two others with legs extended lean over on the right. It was the studied position of each girl's legs that fascinated the artist; he often did not even bother to finish the top half of the body. In the bottom right corner, he quickly sketched a group of four dancers, their heads together in deep discussion, with the observant head of the ballet master just visible behind them.

Using quick, even careless strokes, Degas outlined the figures with abrupt lines as if he was impatient to record each woman's posture or hand movement in the most emphatic terms without sacrificing swiftness or spontaneity. He wasted no time to give depth to the forms with unnecessary shading or hatching; the finger he dragged over the tutu of the dancer at the top left created a smudgy shadow that simply suggests the garment's fabric.