Works by Edgar Degas

Ballet dancers are the subject Edgar Degas is most identified with, and he often showed them rehearsing or backstage, as people at work rather than stars on show.

Ballet at the Paris Opéra, of 1877, is seen from the orchestra pit: heads line the bottom edge, a double bass pushes in at the right, and the dancers' loose hair suggests a rehearsal. It is pastel over a monotype, a pairing Degas often used. In the rougher late pastel Dancers, of about 1896, three of them stretch in the wings in powdery orange, yellow and pink.

He also painted women at work, and his laundresses are as heavy and solid as his dancers are athletic. In Woman Ironing, begun about 1876 and finished about 1887, a woman in a dotted blue blouse irons a shirt under hanging washing. He took up photography in the late 1880s, and some of his photographs of nudes served as reference for drawings and paintings. In After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Back, of 1896, the model twists over a towel, back to the camera, head lost in shadow.

Degas mocked the Impressionists' landscape painters for working outdoors, and his few landscapes came from memory or imagination. Winding River, of 1890, is thin oil paint printed from a copper plate and worked over in pastel, loosely after an 1856 Hiroshige print: a green river loops through orange-flecked fields under a rose sky. Paintings and drawings make up most of the works below; among the early ones are self-portraits from about 1857, one of them an etching and drypoint, his only printed self-portrait.

Sources: Wikipedia, Cleveland Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Minneapolis Institute of Art.