Edgar Degas’ Deux danseuses, executed circa 1897, is a remarkable depiction of the artist’s mature œuvre, in which colour assumed an increasingly prominent role. Throughout the 1870s, Degas had rigorously experimented with various media. His growing use of pastel and charcoal ran parallel to his interest in printmaking, resulting in numerous technical innovations and new artistic procedures. In the present work, Degas’s refined appetite for experimentation is evident in his use of colour highlights, seen in the luminous green background and the dancers’ radiant auburn hair.

According to art historian Henri Loyrette, the term “orgies of colour” is applicable to the Degas’ dancers, “with their increasingly sketchy faces in their polychrome tutus, who endlessly rehearse a limited repertory of movements.” In these drawings “the black and white of a large sheet drawn in charcoal is highlighted with a single note of brilliant colour; sometimes a lively dominant stands out on the rich texture of a pastel, successive layers placed and meticulously fixed one after another, striped and hatched strokes overlapping and juxtaposed” (ibid, p. 168). Deux danseuses, epitomises this very technique as Degas applies not one, but two bright notes of colour hatched across the sheet to create texture and dynamism.

By the mid-1890s, the ballerina had become a central figure in Degas’s work. Their lithe bodies, ruffled tutus, and expressive movements captivated the artist’s attention. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, he was a frequent attendee at the ballet and opera. At the Palais Garnier Opera House, Degas’s visits became so regular that he was granted special access to the rehearsal rooms, allowing him to observe and depict the dancers within an otherwise private environment.

In Deux danseuses, Degas makes a definitive shift away from the portrayal of on-stage performances. Instead, the present work captures an intimate moment of calm anticipation, just before the ballerinas take to the stage. One dancer adjusts her hair, the other her earring—both absorbed in quiet, unguarded gestures that suggest a brief pause before the performance begins. By focusing on these specific, private actions and employing a tightly cropped composition, Degas conveys his enduring fascination with the moments in between—the intervals of rehearsal, rest, or preparation—when the dancers are momentarily removed from the spectacle of performance. Deux danseuses invites the viewer into a voyeuristic role, offering a glimpse of the ballerina at ease. As art historian Martin Schwander observes: “These captivatingly beautiful, melancholy, almost dreamlike images evoke the effort and sacrifices that the dancers have made in their striving for artistic perfection. At the same time, they can be read as visual metaphors of Degas’ approach to art, the striving for the ‘perfect image’ based on constant variation and repetition of a limited repertory of forms” (Martin Schwander in Exh. Cat., Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Edgar Degas, The Late Work, 2012–13, p. 19).

Degas’s choice of medium—charcoal and pastel—afforded him considerable creative freedom, enabling a rendering of his ballerinas with both spontaneity and immediacy. The malleable nature of these materials, combined with careful smudging and the layering of repeated lines, allowed Degas to evoke a subtle sense of movement and vitality in Deux danseuses.

Degas’s determination to capture the movement and poses of his dancers on paper reveals a significant underlying source of inspiration: the emerging art form of photography. As a reader of the popular science magazine La Nature, Degas would have encountered the pioneering photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, who succeeded in freezing the human figure in images taken at intervals of just one-thousandth of a second (fig. 2). Like Muybridge, Degas sought to record the sequential movements of the human body. Ballet dancers—with their varied and expressive poses both on and off stage—offered an ideal subject through which to explore this interest.

Furthermore, the cropped composition and informal presentation of the figures reflect contemporary developments in photography and works to produce a heightened sense of drama and immediacy in Deux danseuses. A contemporary of Degas, the writer and critic Louis Edmond Duranty remarked about the chosen perspective of such works: "Our vantage point is not always located in the centre of a room whose two side walls converge toward the back wall... nor does our point of view always exclude the large expanse of ground or floor in the immediate foreground. Sometimes our viewpoint is very high, sometimes very low; as a result we lose sight of the ceiling, and everything crowds into our immediate field of vision" (quoted in Exh. Cat., The Detroit Institute of Arts and The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Degas and the Dance, 2002-03, pp. 113-14).