Quattro ballerine sul palcoscenico

This canvas was still in Paris in 1950, when it was given to a museum in Sao Paulo that was three years old and had no permanent building. The Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo had been set up in 1947 by the newspaper owner Assis Chateaubriand, who built its collection by pressing Brazilian businessmen to pay for pictures, and by his director Pietro Maria Bardi, who bought hard in a Europe that was still selling off what the war had shaken loose. The banker Walther Moreira Salles was among the donors who covered this one. Degas painted it somewhere between 1885 and 1890, by which time he worked mostly from models holding poses in his studio rather than from the theatre itself. The colour is where he takes liberties. The shadow on the central dancer's arm is laid in with blue marks, and there are patches of purple in a tutu to make the pink come forward.