The Dancers

The Dancers (1885), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts a group of dancers in a characteristic backstage moment — a coloured arrangement of tutus and bodies in the spatial zone between rehearsal and performance. By 1885 Degas's ballet series was entering its richest and most inventive period, and this canvas belongs to the intense decade between his first mature works and the late phase when failing eyesight forced compositional simplification. The Metropolitan's enormous Degas holdings include works from every phase of his career, making the collection an unrivalled resource for understanding his development.

The grouping of multiple dancers creates a composition built from repeating costume forms — the tutus creating similar circular masses at different points in the pictorial space. Degas varies the dancers' poses and the directions of their bodies to prevent this repetition from becoming monotonous, achieving rhythm through variation rather than strict formal order.