Edgar Degas - Four Dancers Ceramic Tile

Four Dancers (Quatre danseuses), made around 1903 in pastel on paper laid down on card by French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas. Four closely packed dancers occupy a shallow pictorial space, their overlapping bodies and repeated gestures creating a dense pattern rather than a conventional stage scene. Late in his career Degas returned repeatedly to familiar ballet poses, altering their scale, placement and colour from one composition to another. The direct pastel strokes make colour itself part of the drawing, with contours emerging from layered marks instead of smooth modelling. The work belongs to the final phase in which dancers became increasingly detached from specific rooms or performances and treated as variations on movement.