Fine dell'arabesque

Degas was after a view of the ballet that no one in the audience could have. Here a dancer finishes her turn, an arabesque with one leg extended behind her, and bows toward the house with a bouquet in her hand, seen from above and off to one side, an angle only someone up in the wings or the flies could catch. He worked the surface in pastel over a thinned-oil underlayer, which let him keep the shimmer of stage light on the tutu while the dark theatre around her dissolves. Degas painted and drew dancers for decades, less interested in the polished performance than in these off-balance moments, the seconds before and after. He returned to this exact motif, the bowing dancer with her flowers, more than once in 1876 and 1877.