About this work
The composition arrests you immediately with its bold diagonal lean: a ballerina bends over, revealing her tutu and a large blue bow as she secures her pointe shoe. The figure fills the picture plane from an unconventional, close vantage — her head and torso pitched downward, the ruffled layers of her costume fanning outward — while the background recedes into a neutral tonal field that offers no distraction. Degas's mastery with pastel is fully on display: the work is at once spontaneous and measured, and the dancer, bending to adjust her shoe, is perfectly highlighted, speaking to the volume of her body, while the medium tone of the paper grounds the piece, creating the mid-values for this well-balanced composition.
The work was created in the mid-1880s, when Degas was at the height of his powers.
Between 1873 and 1874, Degas had already made several studies of dancers adjusting their shoes, shown in different poses and from different angles — drawings that served as preparatory studies for his ballet scenes of the same period — and by the following decade, the motif had deepened into something more resolved and expressive. The artist regarded dance as an essential vehicle for studying the human figure in movement, repeatedly drawing and painting the changing poses of ballerinas — depicting them rehearsing, in mid-performance, and tying their shoes — works that bear witness to the dancers' huge physical effort and concentration.
As only one of his mastery with charcoal and pastel could achieve, the work is a spontaneously executed sketch but has the bearing of a fully resolved work of graphic art — the sureness of his hand allowing him to capture a young dancer adjusting her slipper with all the resolution necessary to give the work its expressive power.
On the wall, this piece rewards intimate spaces: a dressing room, a study, a bedroom with warm morning light that draws out the soft ochres and blues of the pastel. These are not traditional portraits but studies that address the movement of the human body, exploring the physicality and discipline of the dancers through the use of contorted postures and unexpected vantage points — which means the work feels equally at home among serious collections as it does in a personal room that values quiet observation over spectacle. It speaks to the viewer who is drawn to *the in-between moment*: not the performance, but the private ritual before it. The mood is focused, unhurried
