The Dancer Sonia

Derain knew the stage from the inside. For Diaghilev's Ballets Russes he had designed the sets and costumes of The Magic Toyshop, first danced in 1919. Around 1927 he brought dancers into his own work, making a series of paintings and photographs of two young women in long tutus. One of them was Sonia Gaskell, a Lithuanian dancer in her early twenties, in Paris since 1925 and still in training. Here she stands alone, one hand on her hip and the other raised behind her head, resting and a little tired. The dark green backdrop and the red curtain at the edge could belong to a theatre or to the painter's studio, and the museum leaves that open. Paul Guillaume, Derain's dealer, owned it together with a companion picture showing the two dancers in mid-step. Gaskell moved to Amsterdam in 1939, and from 1961 she directed the newly formed Dutch National Ballet.