About this work
is an exercise in restrained intimacy — a tall, narrow pastel that draws the eye downward through three figures caught in an unhurried backstage moment. Two young dancers stand with their mother in what is most likely a hallway just outside an examination room at the Paris Opéra, where mothers served as chaperones and provided practical help with costumes, shoes, sashes, and hair.
One girl, dressed in a ballerina's tutu, is being gently attended to by her mother, while her sister stands nearby in a winter coat and hat — the contrast between the ethereal white of the tutu and the heavier street clothing giving the composition an offhand, caught-between-worlds quality. Both sisters' feet are turned out in the classical ballet position, a quiet reminder that even in an unguarded moment, the discipline of the form never fully disappears.
The palette is unusually sober for Degas — a harmony of blacks, browns, and russets, against which the light tones of the ballet costume stand forth.
Executed in pastel on paper around 1889, measuring 90 × 50 cm, the work is held in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Degas knew the Mante family well: the father, Louis-Amédée Mante, was a double-bass player in the Opéra orchestra, and the daughters, Suzanne and Blanche, were students in the ballet who would later become members of the corps de ballet.
Unusually for Degas, no preparatory sketches for this work have survived, and it is possible the portrait was created from a photograph taken by the girls' father — himself an innovative photographer who contributed to the development of color photography — as Degas is known to have used photographs as the basis for other portraits. The work sits at a rare intersection in his output: part portrait, part backstage observation, blending the psychological precision of his early portraiture with the informal world of the Opéra he had made entirely his own.
This is a pastel that rewards a measured wall and a patient eye. Its vertical format — tall and slender — makes it particularly well suited to a narrow hallway, a dressing room, or a reading corner where it can be encountered up close. The muted warmth of the palette — those deep blacks, earthy browns, and single pop of ballet white — sits comfortably against both pale and dark walls, and alongside natural wood or aged gilt framing. It speaks to the viewer who is drawn not to spectacle but to the private choreography of everyday life: the adjusting of a ribbon, the quiet wait before a door opens.
