A passꦯionate observer of modern life, fascinated with performance and ritual, Degas explored two main themes throughout his artistic career: ballet dancers and horse races. Degas’ lifelong interest in da💮nce developed in the 1860s, when as a young man he regularly attended ballet and other performances such as opera, café-concerts and the circus. Degas was attracted to the spectacle and excitement of live entertainment and found an endless source of inspiration in ballet, sketching the performers from nature. In this manner he was able to study both the natural unguarded gestures of dancers at rest and the stylized movements of classical ballet. Degas was fascinated not only by the public spectacle of ballet performances, but also by the more informal situations around them: the behind-the-scenes world of the rehearsal room or the dance class, the dancers’ preparation for and tension before a performance, and the more relaxed, casual moments that followed afterwards. In the same way as Degas often captured horses and riders in the more unofficial situations before or after the race, his ballet dancers are usually shown away from the spotlight of the stage, in the more informal moments such as warming up before a performance or resting after the rehearsal.

“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 succession 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 was employed by other great Impressionists such as Monet and Pissarro in their famous series paintingꦬs 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.