Drawing

This is a working drawing by Edgar Degas, and drawing was the ground everything else in his art stood on. He filled sheets his whole life with a handful of subjects watched over and over, a dancer shifting her weight, a woman at her bath, a horse gathering to move, coming back to the same pose again and again until the line caught it. Many such studies he kept in the studio as working material rather than pictures to sell, and he would lift a figure from an old sheet years later into a pastel or a painting. He once said that no art was ever less spontaneous than his, that it was all reflection and study. This sheet, now in Sofia, belongs to that steady daily habit of drawing.