Dancer in Her Dressing Room

Although Edgar Degas exhibited in the first six and also the last of the Impressionist exhibitions, he did not share the Impressionists' enthusiasm for creating landscapes. He sought to combine the best of Impressionism—its vivid rendering of light and atmosphere, acceptance of instantaneous movement, and use of bright, vibrant tone—with the classical tradition of Ingres and the old masters.

More than half of Degas' oils and pastels depict ballerinas from the Paris Opera on stage, in their dressing rooms, in rehearsal, or at rest. In the mid-1870s Degas turned to pastel—a supple, easily reworkable medium that he combined with gouache and tempera, and then applied with a brush.

"Dancer in Her Dressing Room" displays Degas’s attraction to the decorative lines, bold foreshortening, and nonlinear perspective he admired in Japanese prints. He conveyed spatial recession by using the top of the dressing table, repeated by the edge of the open drawer, and opposed by the arm of the armchair, to imply a series of nonintersecting diagonals. We see the dancer’s toilette from a bird’s-eye vantage point, illuminated by the direct glare of a single gaslight, which strikes the figure frontally and casts amorphous shadows in the background. The illumination changes the color of her flesh to a harsh pink.

Degas worked this canvas with pastel over peinture à l’essence (oil colors thinned and mixed freely with turpentine). The combination of Japanese decorative design with European realism gives this piece its impact.