Degas | The Blue Dancers

About The Blue Dancers by Edgar Degas

Degas made The Blue Dancers around 1897, when he was in his sixties and his sight was failing. Pastel suited the condition he was in: it needed no preparation and no drying time, it could be reworked indefinitely, and he could hold the sheet close to his face while he worked. Four dancers, seen from very near, fill a square sheet only 67 cm across.

There is no stage, no audience and no floor. The dancers are crowded into a corner of the wings, adjusting shoulder straps and hair, seen from slightly above and cropped hard at every edge — a habit Degas took from Japanese prints and from the photographs he was making himself in the 1890s. The costumes are not one blue. Flecks of green, orange and yellow run through them, and the heads are drawn round with a blue stronger than anything else on the sheet.

The pastel belonged to Sergei Shchukin in Moscow until his collection was nationalised in 1918. It passed to the State Museum of Modern Western Art, and when that museum was dissolved in 1948 it was transferred to the Pushkin Museum, where it hangs now.

Own a hand-painted The Blue Dancers

Degas did not treat this sheet as a single surface. In places the pastel is dry chalk dragged across the grain of the paper and left as separate gritty strokes; in others he wetted and steamed it until it behaved like paint, then smoothed it flat with a brush and his thumb. The picture is made of two entirely different kinds of touch, and the contrast between the granular and the smoothed is what makes tulle look like tulle and skin look like skin. A printed copy lays down every square centimetre with the same ink film on the same surface, so the whole image acquires one uniform texture and that distinction is simply gone. Reproduced by hand in oils, the tutus can be scumbled dry and the arms laid in smooth, and the difference survives.