Four Dancers

Four Dancers is one of the late, large ensembles in which Edgar Degas returned obsessively to the bodies of ballerinas, reducing them to a frieze of repeated forms that verge on abstraction. The four young women, shown adjusting their shoulder straps as if about to step onto the stage, were treated by Degas as variations on a single motif, the same figure bent, straightened, and seen from shifting angles. Painted about 1899, when he worked largely from memory and from reworked compositions, it shows the fervor with which he pursued motion and musculature at the very limit of Impressionism.