The theme of the dancers had entered Degas' works almost incidentally, in his 1869 paintingL'orchestre de l'Opéra. That picture, showing Degas' musician friends playing their instruments, featured dancers in the background, as though this group portrait were instead a snapshot taken during a ...
10.The show flows backwards over 500 years, from Freud to Matisse to Edgar Degas, then to the Victorians such as Lord Leighton, and English court and portrait painters, notably Joshua Reynolds and Anthony Van Dyck. 11.Each time, though, Degas chose to show not the glitter but the hard wo...
-Artsunder the supervision of Louis Lamothe, a minor follower ofJean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Surviving works from that period show Degas’s aptitude fordrawingand his attention to the historical precedents he viewed in theLouvre. He also began his first solemn explorations of the self-portrait....