Estate of the artist (sold: 1re vente de l'atelier Edgar Degas, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, May 6-8, 1918, lot 228)
Jacques Seligmann, Paris and New York (acquired at the above sale and sold: American Art Galleries, New York, January 27, 1921, lot 46)
Durand-Ruel, New York (acquired at the above sale)
Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the above on July 4, 1921 and until January 13, 1961)
Sale: Drouot Montaigne, Paris, April 26, 2001, lot 31
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Paul-André Lemoisne, Degas et son oeuvre, vol. 3, Paris, 1946, no. 1374, illustrated p. 799
Lillian Browse, Degas Dancers, Boston, 1949, no. 245 (titled Trois danseuses debout dans les coulisses and as dating from circa 1905-12)
Degas 1879 (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Scotland, The Mound, 1979, discussed p. 84
Richard Kendall, Degas beyond Impressionism, London, 1996, fig. 158, illustrated p. 139 (titled Group of dancers and as dating circa 1900-5)

“One of the most distinctive shifts in Degas’s working practices in later life was towards the sequence or series.  Rather than create a unique statement of his chosen subject, in the form of a single drawing, pastel or oil painting, he would generate a sucession of near-identical variants that eventually formed a ‘family’ of compositions”   (Richard Kendall, Degas beyond Impressionism, London, 1996, p. 186). 

The practice of repeating a single subject wꦯas employed as well by the other gr🎶eat Impressionists such as Monet and Pissarro in their famous series paintings of such subjects as the Rouen Cathedral, haystacks or the boulevards of Paris.  Degas, however, was not continuously re-presenting a scene under different lighting and atmospheric conditions, but rather discovering new compositional possibilities in the deployment of an abstract architecture of bent limbs, turning bodies and radiating skirts. 

The present work relates to at least eight other drawings of circa 1900 revolving around the grouping of dancers in the great pas🙈tel of the Burrell Collection, Glasgow.