Edgar Degas - Blue Dancers Baby Blanket

Blue Dancers (Les Danseuses bleues), made around 1898 in pastel on paper by French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas. Four dancers in blue costumes crowd the square sheet as they adjust shoes, straps and clothing in the wings rather than perform for an audience. Their overlapping bodies and repeated gestures create the sense of successive moments compressed into a single image; the group has even been interpreted as one model observed in several positions. Degas uses dense strokes of blue, violet, green and ochre to dissolve the boundary between figures and background. The pastel later belonged to collector Sergei Shchukin in Moscow.