Ballet Dancers

This picture stayed in Degas's studio for as long as he lived. He died in September 1917, and it was sold in Paris in December 1918, a month after the armistice, in the second of the auctions that emptied his studio. London bought it in 1926 through the Courtauld Fund, money given by the textile industrialist Samuel Courtauld to acquire modern French painting for the nation. It is oil on canvas, yet the paint is laid on so thin and dry that it passes for pastel, and in places the bare canvas shows through. The white tutus were practice skirts, worn by the younger dancers at the Paris Opéra. In front, one dancer props her foot on a green bench to fix her shoe ribbons, bent so far forward that we mostly see her back.