Three Dancers

The late-career masterpiece, Three Dancers, created by Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) between 1895 and 1900, encapsulates his enduring fascination with the movements and backstage life of ballet dancers. This particular work, classified as a print within the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection, showcases Degas’s experimental approach to drawing. The support consists of tan wove tracing paper, which has been pieced together and laid down on a cream wove card, creating a substantial ground for the demanding media.

Degas utilized a sophisticated combination of charcoal and wetted charcoal, employing the technique of stumping to achieve soft, atmospheric transitions and deep shadows. This wet application, alongside the rich charcoal, gives the figures a sense of weight and motion that borders on abstraction, typical of his production during this period in France. The artist often used drawings like this as preparatory studies, although the complexity of the materials suggests it may have been a finished piece intended for exhibition. A minor detail of note is the accidental mark in blue crayon visible at the right edge of the card support.

Degas, who spent much of his career observing the Parisian Opéra, perfected the representation of the body in motion. The vitality captured in Three Dancers reflects the dynamism of French fin-de-siècle art. The classification of the work as a print may refer to the graphic nature of the media, distinguishing it from his oil paintings. This significant drawing resides in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. As the work is now held in the public domain, high-quality images and related studies are widely accessible, allowing scholars and enthusiasts worldwide to study Degas’s unparalleled draftsmanship.