Description
Year of creation: 1900
Original size: 97.8 cm x 130.2 cm
Painting style: Impressionism
Original technique: Oil on canvas
Located: Phillips Collection, Washington (inv. 0479)
Dancers at the Barre – Edgar Degas
Two dancers at the barre, both in blue skirts, both turned away from the viewer. One stands and holds the barre; the other has already laid her leg along it and stretches out down its length. This is not a performance but a rehearsal – which is why it is a hand painted record of work rather than of a scene staged for an audience.
The moment the audience never sees
Both figures are shown from behind or from the side; neither looks out at us. The barre runs across the canvas as a horizontal line that the bodies lean on and align to. The movement is not stopped at its peak but somewhere in between: mid-stretch, mid-shift of weight, mid-wait. Degas spent decades in the practice rooms rather than the box, and this painting is the consequence of that habit.
A background that describes nothing
The ground behind is a burning orange and describes nothing: no wall, no room, only a field of colour against which the blue of the skirts sounds louder. That opposition carries the whole canvas. Where the younger Degas would have painted the rehearsal room, here only colour remains, and the eye has nowhere to escape except to the two bodies.
The late Degas
Late in life he painted exactly like this: laying colour in layers until the colour itself became the event. His sight was failing, the formats grew, the contours thickened. Set this canvas beside the early history subject and forty years open up between them; set it beside the late bathers and you see the same hand in the same decade.
Our version
Our version is a hand-painted oil painting on canvas. Every canvas is painted individually, in the size and frame you choose. The painter works from the original with brush and oils, so the strokes and the layering stay visible – the part a print cannot reproduce. The photographs of finished paintings above this text are our own completed canvases, not a reproduction of the museum original.
