Frieze of Dancers

Degas took up the camera in 1895 and spent that winter photographing friends indoors at night, arranging them and holding them still through long exposures by lamplight. This long panel comes from about the same moment. The Cleveland Museum of Art reads it as possibly one dancer seen from four positions as she bends to fasten her shoe, set in no particular room. Laying a single body out in a sequence of views was an idea already in the air, mostly through Eadweard Muybridge, whose serial photographs of people and animals in motion had been published in the 1880s and were known in Paris. Degas let the paint run and drip here, and pressed in the circles along the bottom with his thumb.