Quattro ballerine

By about 1899 Degas was in his mid-60s and his eyesight was failing badly, and his late dancers look nothing like the cool grey rehearsal scenes of twenty years before. Here four dancers cluster at the edge of the stage, adjusting the straps of their costumes in the moment before they go on, against a backdrop of loose green scenery lit as if by late-summer sun. He built the group from a handful of studies of what may be a single model in different poses, repeated and shifted across the canvas. The colour is turned right up, orange and green pushed hard together. He was working now as much from memory and old photographs as from anything in front of him.