Ballet Dancer with Arms Crossed

Ballet Dancer with Arms Crossed (1872), at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, represents an early work from Degas's sustained engagement with the Opéra ballet — a subject he had begun exploring after gaining backstage access in 1871. The single figure with arms crossed is the simplest possible compositional format for this subject: one dancer, at rest, studied with the attention of a scientist and the sensibility of a painter fascinated by the trained body's characteristic postures. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston holds a significant collection of French art including major Impressionist works.

The early date (1872) places this study in the period when Degas was still developing his visual language for the ballet subject. The figure is rendered with greater formal precision than his later works — edges are sharper, the space more conventionally described — showing the academic foundation upon which his later looser and more radical treatments would develop.