Three Dancers
1895/1900
Medium
Charcoal and wetted charcoal, with stumping, on tan wove tracing paper, pieced, and laid down on cream wove card (with accidental mark in blue crayon at right)
Dimensions
52.8 × 49.7 cm (20 13/16 × 19 5/8 in.)
Classification
prints and drawing
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
185851
Art Historical Context
In the late 1890s, Edgar Degas captured the graceful poise of ballet dancers in *Three Dancers*, a drawing dated around 1895–1900. A key figure in the Impressionist—though he preferred the term "realist"—Degas was renowned for his intimate depictions of the ballet world, often portraying dancers in moments of repose or rehearsal rather than on stage. This work, housed in the Art Institute of Chicago's Prints and Drawings department, exemplifies his lifelong obsession with movement, form, and the female figure, created during his later years when failing eyesight drew him deeper into monochrome...
About the Artist
Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas · 1834–1917
Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas, born on July 19, 1834, in Paris to a prosperous banking family, was the eldest of five children. His mother, Célestine Musson, a Creole from New Orleans whose father Germain Musson had roots in Haiti, died when Degas was thirteen, leaving his father Augustin and unmarried uncles to guide him. Educated at the elite Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he earned a baccalauréat in...