Dancers in Pink

Edgar Degas

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Keywords: DancersPink

Work Overview

Dancers in Pink
Edgar Degas
Date: 1880 - 1885
Style: Impressionism
Genre: genre painting
Location: Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT, US


Now take a look at the dresses, and more specifically the brush strokes on the tutus. Soft, sweeping motions that read like soft pastels. His pinks are at once luscious and soft, full yet void of weight.


And here is an interesting fact about the painting’s exhibition history. In 1893 it was exhibited at the Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition in New York to raise money for the pedestal base for the Statue of Liberty. One critic remarked about the “… repulsively real ballet girls [but] magnificently brushed in.” Whether Degas was depicting nudes or dancers, he characteristically drew them in realistic, contemporary settings as opposed to the idealized, classical style that was accepted by the academics of his time.