Dancers (c. 1896): Art, History and Details

Dancers (c. 1896) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Degas depicted the ballet in more than 1,000 paintings, prints, pastels, and sculptures. He preferred private, offstage moments to glamorous curtain calls or artfully constructed compositions. Here, three dancers stretch together in the wings, unaware of the viewer’s presence. Powdery layers of yellow, orange, and pink pastel create a rough surface characteristic of Degas’s late work in the medium. He invented special techniques that allowed him to build layer upon layer of color with varying degrees of opacity and transparency. This pastel’s rich surface and intense, vibrating palette is the result of such innovative methods.

Object facts

• Title: Dancers
• Date: c. 1896
• Creator attribution: Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pastel with charcoal on tracing paper mounted on paper and backed with gray board
• Dimensions: Sheet: 55.7 x 41.4 cm (21 15/16 x 16 5/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1916.1043

A detail from the museum

Degas joined six separate irregularly shaped sheets of paper to make this work, and their connections are faintly visible on its surface.

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade

Further reading listed by the museum

• Illustrated Catalogue of the Cleveland Art Loan Exposition. Exh. cat. Cleveland: Cleveland School of Art, 1913.
• Catalogue of the Inaugural Exhibition. Exh. cat. Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1915.
• "The Wade Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 1 (1917): 3-12.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.