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Lot Essay
From the 1870s on, Degas has made numerous drawings of dancers usually depicted practising or resting in the private behind-the-scenes world of rehearsal room or dance class.
"The dancer could be seen as an incarnation of drawing. Line was the governing element of her achievement, the right and the wrong of what she was doing. Line was given by her limbs, her arms and legs, the centering of her body, her à plomb. To draw a dancer's body was to re-enact through her limbs the terms of figure drawing itself, both as description and as expression. How often in his drawings of dancers the line of an arm or a leg will soar out from the body, cutting out a shape that has no meaning that can be translated but presents itself simply as a measured claim upon space?" (R. Gordon and A. Forge, Degas, New York, 1988, p. 176).
"The dancer could be seen as an incarnation of drawing. Line was the governing element of her achievement, the right and the wrong of what she was doing. Line was given by her limbs, her arms and legs, the centering of her body, her à plomb. To draw a dancer's body was to re-enact through her limbs the terms of figure drawing itself, both as description and as expression. How often in his drawings of dancers the line of an arm or a leg will soar out from the body, cutting out a shape that has no meaning that can be translated but presents itself simply as a measured claim upon space?" (R. Gordon and A. Forge, Degas, New York, 1988, p. 176).