Dancers at the Barre by Edgar Degas - ca. 1900 - 51 1/4 x 38 1/2 in The Phillips Collection Dancers at the Barre by Edgar Degas - ca. 1900 - 51 1/4 x 38 1/2 in The Phillips Collection

Dancers at the Barre

oil on canvas • 51 1/4 x 38 1/2 in
  • Edgar Degas - 19 July 1834 - 27 September 1917 Edgar Degas ca. 1900

Dancers at the Barre exemplifies Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas’s ability, late in his career, to allow the expressive application of medium and color to overtake the rationality of subject and composition. The motif of a dancer with her leg propped up on a practice barre appears as early as the mid-1870s and continues to around 1900. This work is one of the latest representations.

Duncan Phillips, founder of The Phillips Collection, called the painting a “masterpiece [which] in its monumentality… is unique among all [Degas’s] decorations celebrating… dancers. [In its] daring record of instantaneous change at a split second of observation [he] miraculously… transformed the incident of swiftly seen shapes in time into a thrilling vision of dynamic forms in space.”

We present today's painting thanks to The Phillips Collection :)