Danseuses montant un escalier

When Count Isaac de Camondo, a Paris banker, died in April 1911, he left his collection to the Louvre, and this canvas came with it. The Louvre did not normally take work by artists dead less than ten years, and Degas was still alive, aged 76. The museum accepted anyway, with the banker's condition that the collection be shown together, and its rooms opened in June 1914. The painting is long and low, made in the late 1880s. Dancers climb a staircase into the frame at a bottom corner, only heads and shoulders showing, while one who has reached the top looks through a doorway into a rehearsal room where others wait in pale tutus. Much of the rest is bare wall. Before Camondo owned it, the picture belonged to the jeweller Henri Vever, who had it by 1890.