About this work
There is a well-documented painting simply titled *Four Dancers* (c. 1899) by Degas, held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. — and given that the product is titled "Dancers 4 By Edgar Degas," this is almost certainly the work being sold. I now have strong grounding to write a specific, accurate description.
At first glance, *Four Dancers* arrests the eye with sheer chromatic force: three dancers wear rust-orange bodices over tutus painted loosely with flecks of pale celery green and buttercup yellow against a muted royal-blue background. The fourth figure, set apart to the far left, stands with her arm lifted and hand held high, her bodice painted in a brighter carrot orange, more loosely rendered than the rest. Behind the figures, dense green foliage extends off the top edge of the canvas, a pale sage-green field stretches before puffy trees daubed with mauve-pink highlights, and a coral-pink and golden-yellow sky is streaked with lavender-grey clouds. The figures are caught in a liminal, off-stage moment — emphatic dark lines shape the heads and arms while theatrical lighting over the off-stage performers recolors the figures and creates a simple complementary scheme of red-orange and green hues.
The four figures were based on photographs of a single model in different poses, effectively representing one ballerina moving through space.
Painted around 1899, *Four Dancers* is one of the largest and most ambitious of Degas's late works, existing in several variants that show different kinds and degrees of modification.
Two of the figures repeat poses from a unique set of three photographic negatives shot between about 1895 and 1898 — original plates that solarized into colors resembling, in reverse, the oranges and greens of the painting; Degas owned the plates and may even have taken the pictures himself.
Eadward Muybridge's sequential photographs may also have influenced the arrangement of the four dancers, particularly his 1887 *Animal Locomotion* — their poses, a succession of preparatory gestures, depict a progression of intricate movements. This was a period in which Degas was pushing his late style toward something more abstract and elemental: the ballet, a subject he had pioneered in the 1870s, dominated these late works — but compared to his earlier output, they had been stripped of anecdotal interest, the focus no longer on behind-the-scenes specificities of dance production or its social context.
As wall art, *Four Dancers* rewards a room that can hold its scale and heat. By the late 1880s Degas's eyesight
