Frieze of Dancers (c. 1895): Art, History and Details

Frieze of Dancers (c. 1895) 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:

This painting may depict a single dancer seen from four different viewpoints. The young woman is placed in an undefined setting, surrounded by mere wisps of color, applied so spontaneously that the paint ran and dripped. Degas even added the circles in the foreground with his thumb. Such audacity, while acceptable in a small sketch, must have shocked the artist's contemporaries when presented on a six-foot canvas. Equally radical is the idea of combining multiple views of a single figure. Degas's unusual presentation may have been inspired by the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904)

Object facts

• Title: Frieze of Dancers
• Date: c. 1895
• Creator attribution: Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 103 x 233.5 x 7 cm (40 9/16 x 91 15/16 x 2 3/4 in.); Unframed: 70 x 200.5 cm (27 9/16 x 78 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1946.83

A detail from the museum

The ballet is a subject Degas returned to again and again over the course of his career. Rather than public performances, he often depicted dancers behind the curtain, practicing, waiting, or, as in this painting, lacing up their shoes.

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Meier-Graefe, Julius. Degas: ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Malerei. München: R. Piper, 1920.
• Frances, Henry S. "Degas' Frieze of Dancers entitled Danseuses ajustant leurs chaussons." Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art XXXIII, no. 6 (June, 1946) 87-94.
• Milliken, William M. "Report for the Year 1946." Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art XXXIVI, no. 6 (June, 1947) 127-139.

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.