Harlequin Dance

Harlequin Dance, a pastel from around 1890 now at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, shows Degas applying his dancers' observation skills to a theatrical subject outside the ballet — the harlequin of the commedia dell'arte tradition, which had a long history in French art and entertainment. By the 1890s Degas was expanding his repertoire of performance subjects, responding to the variety of theatrical spectacle available in Paris. The harlequin's diamond-patterned costume and acrobatic physicality provided him with fresh formal material: different movement vocabularies and costume designs from the white tutus of the ballet, but the same fundamental interest in the performing body observed with acute attention.

The pastel medium suits the theatrical subject — the vivid colored diamonds of the harlequin costume can be rendered with the chromatic directness that pastel allows, without the mixing and blending required in oil paint. Degas builds the costume pattern through individual strokes of different colors that read as a unified pattern at normal viewing distance. The figure's theatrical movement is captured with the same motion-arrested quality he brought to his ballet subjects.