Edgar Degas

The artist’s estate (L.658),

sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, Atelier Edgar Degas, 4ème vente, 2-4 July 1919, lot 138a;

with Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris;

Private collection, Paris;

sale, Paris, Beaussant & Lefèvre, 18 May 2001, lot 153;

with W.M. Brady & Co., Inc., New York, Master Drawings: 1700-1900, 2002, no. 32,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts; Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Degas and the Dance, 2002-3, no. 154;

New York, The Morgan Library & Museum; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, 2007, no. 85 (entry by Jennifer Tonkovich);

London, Royal Academy of Arts, Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, 2011, no. 10

In this drawing, which combines both a sense of grace and energy, Degas returns to perhaps his favorite subject: the ballet. Dating to circa 1870-73, the sheet includes five studies of dancers’ legs which are connected with at least four major paintings that focus on dancers in training: The Dance Class of 1873 (Corcoran Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), the two depictions of La Classe de Dance of 1873 and 1875-6 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and The Dance Class of circa 1874 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).¹

The study at the center, showing legs crossed at the ankle, relates to a seated dancer in both the Metropolitan Museum and Musée d’Orsay paintings. The study below, showing the feet close together but legs wide apart (a position dancers use to stretch their thighs) also relates to both these paintings. The legs to the center right, which adopt the ‘second position’, are found in the figure, second from the right, in the background of the Washington picture. Degas referred to the legs in ‘fourth position’, seen here in the lower left, for his central figure in the Musee d’Orsay paintings, while finally, the feet ‘turned out’, in the lower middle-right, relate to the standing dancer in the foreground of the Metropolitan Museum version.

Edgar Degas’s lifelong fascination with dance began in the 1860s, when, as a young artist, he was a frequent visitor to the ballet, opera, café-concerts, and the circus. Drawn to the spectacle and vitality of live performance, he found in these settings a rich and inexhaustible source of artistic inspiration. Sketching directly from life, Degas observed both the unguarded, natural gestures of dancers at rest and the disciplined, stylized movements of classical ballet. His interest extended beyond the glamour of the stage to the intimate, unseen world behind it - the rehearsal rooms and dance classes, the moments of concentration and fatigue before a performance, and the quiet relaxation that followed.

Ballet Dancers' Legs is executed on blue paper and is a remarkable drawing, full of methodical observation and elegance, that also reveals the rigorous preparation behind Degas’s apparently spontaneous depictions of ballet life.

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Galerie Brame & Lorenceau, and it is included in the archives of the artist.

^1.Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, inv. no. 2014.79.710; Paris, Musée d'Orsay, inv. no. RF 1976 and RF 51757; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 1987.47.1