Three Dancers in an Exercise Hall

The ballerina series follows Degas' earlier studies of both lower and middle class women, where he looked at the moment when they let their public face drop, and pretense gave way to an awareness of the reality of both themselves and their surrounding. With ballerinas he was primarily interested in the contrast between their beauty and grace on stage and the reality of the physical and physiological toil such artifice took on the performers. Of the more than 200 works, only 50 show the dancers performing on stage, the rest are set in rehearsals or capture fleeting, private moments like this. Degas was taken by the peripheral world of the dancers, the rehearsals and backstage moments, a world to which he did not have access to until 1885; he only became interest in the ballet in 1870, and backstage was strictly limited to long term patrons. Happy Easter!