Avant le spectacle

Degas was in his sixties when he made this and had long since stopped putting his work in front of the public. The last Impressionist exhibition was in 1886, his eyesight was going, and he was working in a studio on the rue Victor-Massé from drawings and from memory instead of from the wings of the Opéra.

That is where the colour comes from. The greens and oranges are what gaslight does to a stage, and by the late 1890s he had given up trying to make them look like daylight. He painted it on paper and then laid the paper down onto canvas.

It is in Edinburgh because Sir Alexander Maitland gave it in 1960, in memory of his wife Rosalind, along with the rest of the small collection the two of them had put together.