Throughout his career, Degas had a passion for painting living forms in motion.  In Degas’ eyes, women, as well as racehorses, were “wonderful pieces of mechanism” that crouched, turned, gaped, stretched and lifted with grace.  The same disciplined beauty of movement that attracted Degas to horses also drew him to his most famous subjects, girls of the ballet.  Audiences see ballet dancers as ethereal beings of another world, delicate and lighter than air.  Degas saw them as skinny creatures of muscle and bone whose apparent grace and lightness are the end product of incredibly hard work.  To translate this revelation into pictures, Degas scrupulously observed dancers backstage, at classes and rehearsals, as well as during performances.  In close observation of ballet people – the old dancers who had become teachers, the poor young girls in the back lines of the chorus – he found the quality of movement he had been searching for since the early days of painting horses.  So intently did Degas study his subjects that he could recall the most subtle detail of what he had seen in the theater from only a few sketches and notes.

Degas ballet pastels are so spontaneous that they seem to have been made on the spot.  Actually he worked in his studio, posing off-duty dancers from his precise memory, aided only by quick but specific sketches at the theater.  In his finished studies, Degas often used pastel colors because, being both dry and opaque, they enabled him to work swiftly, to retouch and experiment with bright harmonies.  He also sometimes reworked the dusty, soft pastel finish by blowing steam over the surface, moistening the colors, and then using a stiff brush to create even more delicate tones.

ART PRINT – “DANCING CLASS” from the original painting by Edgar Degas, printed by the Penn Prints, New York.  The print is in very good condition.  It measures 12” x 10 ¼”, and is matted to 16” x 14” for easy framing.