Ballet at the Paris Opéra1877
Ballerinas in tutus fill the stage of the Paris Opéra, watched from the darkened house. More about this work
About this work
Ballerinas in tutus fill the stage of the Paris Opéra, watched from the darkened house. Degas began with a monotype, inking a plate and printing a single impression, and then worked over it in pastel, so that the dark printed base gives depth to the brilliant touches of colour on top. The unusual viewpoint, cutting into the scene as if glimpsed from a seat close by, owes something to Japanese prints and to photography, and it makes the spectator part of the picture.
Written by Ochre Editions.
What you’re looking at
Color pastel drawing of ballerinas in tutus on stage, watched by audience.
Description from the Art Institute of Chicago.
How it was made
- Pastel
- Sticks of almost pure pigment with very little binder. The colour sits on the paper as powder: bright, matte and fragile.
- Laid paper
- Handmade on a mould of close-set wires, which leave fine parallel lines you can see when the sheet is held to the light.
Edgar Degas
French, 1834–1917 · Born and died in Paris.
Degas trained in the academic tradition, admired Ingres and spent three years in Italy copying earlier art, but turned to modern Paris for his subjects: dancers, racecourses, laundresses, milliners and café singers. He helped organise the Impressionist exhibitions and showed in all but one, yet preferred to call himself a realist. Working from drawing and memory rather than outdoors, he composed with unexpected cropping and viewpoints, and in later years worked mostly in pastel as his eyesight failed.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Impressionism
Painters in 1870s Paris who worked quickly, often outdoors, to catch light as it changed.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Art Institute of Chicago has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1981.12
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Type
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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More by Edgar Degas
All their works
Close in colour
