Degas’ Art and His Curious Relationship with Women
Exploring the work of Edgar Degas
Christopher P Jones is the author of How to Read Paintings, an introduction to some of the most fascinating artworks in art history.
Edgar Degas painted young ballet dancers with an almost obsessive curiosity. Nearly half of his oil paintings and pastel works depict ballerinas at the corps de ballet at the Paris Opéra.
Many of the works focus on the backstage preparations: teaching classes, rehearsal and dressing room scenes. A backstage friend once noted, “He comes here in the morning. He watches all the exercises in which the movements are analyzed . . . nothing in the most complicated step escapes his gaze.”
Despite the veneer of classical beauty, the Paris ballet hid a more gruelling reality. Girls as young as eight years old worked up to 12 hours a day, sometimes six or seven days a week. These were the conditions of modern Paris, a hive of intense creativity and — for the poor at least — of desperate survival too.
Degas was enthralled by the spectacle of ballet. He enjoyed the company of the dancers and shared gossip with them as…
