Detail of Dancers at the Barre by Degas in the Phillips Collection, January 2011

Dancers at the Barre

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas 1834-1917

Nationality: French

Creating Date: ca. 1900

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 51 1/4 x 38 1/2 in.; 130.175 x 97.79 cm

Credit Line: Acquired 1944

Dancers at the Bar exemplifies Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas’s ability, late in his career, to allow the expressive application of medium and color to overtake the rationality of subject and composition. The motif of a dancer with her leg propped up on a practice bar appears as early as the mid-1870’s and continues to around 1900. This work is one of the latest representations.

Phillips called the painting a “masterpiece (which) in its monumentality… is unique among all (Degas’s) decorations celebrating… dancers. (In its) daring record of instantaneous change at a split second of observation (he) miraculously… transformed the incident of swiftly seen shapes in time into a thrilling vision of dynamic forms in space.”


Text from: www.phillipscollection.org/collection/browse-the-collection?id=0479