About this work
This pastel from around 1884 presents two figures caught in an unguarded backstage moment: one dancer bent in concentration, pulling on her vivid red stockings, while the figure to her left stands cross-armed, an expression of quiet melancholy on her face. The composition is intimate and close — nothing grand, nothing performed. Executed in pastel on pink laid paper and measuring nearly 30 by 23 inches, the original is held in The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York. The warm blush of the paper ground plays against the startling, chromatic jolt of the red stockings, which anchor the eye at once. Degas builds the scene through layered, directional strokes, the figures emerging from an undefined background — present, specific, and completely unselfconscious.
Degas generally used oils for his completed works before 1880, but from after 1875 he began using pastels more frequently, even in finished works, and by 1885, most of his more important works were done in pastel. *Dancer With Red Stockings* sits right at the heart of that transition — a major pastel from the precise moment the medium became his primary voice. The work shows the complex pastel technique favoured by Degas during the 1880s, layering, blending and smudging the tones to create the effect of rich, pulsating colour.
As one critic has written, Degas "loves to watch them fight balky muscles and gravity… as they torture themselves to be on display" — and this work makes that tension visible in both figures simultaneously: one straining through physical labour, the other retreating into herself. When first exhibited in New York in 1886, the work was shown as *Danseuse Pulling on Her Tights*, a title that foregrounds the unglamorous, working reality Degas was always most interested in.
This is a painting for rooms that can hold an atmosphere. It suits a study, a library, or a dark-walled interior with warm directional light — somewhere the mood is considered rather than cheerful. The palette of flesh tones, dusty mid-tones, and that one electric burst of red means it works equally well in modern interiors that are anchored by a single color statement. Degas often portrayed his dancers mid-movement, during their lessons and getting ready behind the stage — and that quality of the in-between, of something private and unresolved, is precisely what makes this work so compelling as a long-term presence on a wall. The viewer who returns to it will find something different each time: the sadness of the second figure, the physicality of the first, the strange dignity of an ordinary moment rendered monumental.
