Degas' fascination with dancers and ballet lasted his entire life and the first major canvases of ballet rehearsals date from the early 1870's. It was not until about ten years later, however, that

The dancers, no longer spied out at a distance, no longer
observed in representative attitudes, have become the
substance of the picture itself. Their movements are the
movements of the picture. The draughtsman, the man who
"loved drawing very much", had found immediate access to
the music of painting, a music that no longer needed a
libretto in manners, in categories of dress or gesture,
in witticisms of viewpoint, in order to be heard. Now
the body in its own music, the picture its own body.
(R. Gordon and A. Forge, Degas, New York, 1986, p. 218)

He was now absorbed by dancers preparing to perform, dancers adjusting their costumes between performances. In Danseuses aux repos the dancers' arms weave a lattice of diagonals counterpointed by the sharp angle of the floor and the strutting vertical lines of the chair legs which are echoed by the geometry of the cropped double window in the top left. The dancers are absorbed in fixing their hair and shoes, two bent seated from the waist toward each other but untouching, the one oblivious to her full skirt which soars behind her like a squirrel's tail.

This is very closely related to a smaller version of the same subject in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Havemeyer Bequest, Lemoisne 542).