Dancers

Two ballet dancers in rehearsal are captured in the broad, quick strokes of pastel, the medium Degas had long since made almost his own by the 1890s. He often worked these later dance subjects on tracing paper, whose smooth face let the chalk blend to rich, glowing colour, and mounted the sheet afterward. The compressed, off-center view and the near-abstract blur of the figures reflect how far his observation of the theatre had moved from descriptive transcription toward pure pattern of light and line.