Ballet Dancer with Arms Crossed by Edgar Degas Poster

Ballet Dancer with Arms Crossed by Edgar Degas, oil on canvas c. 1872, is a painting of a half-length figure of a dark-haired young girl standing in profile view in her ballet tutu with her arms crossed in a pensive pose. Painted in deftly decisive contours of thinned oil paint with broad washes of oil colours heavily thinned with turpentine, or essence, the picture captures the form of the subject, muscular tension, light, colour and atmosphere in a quickly painted, sketchy composition that at first appears unfinished. Degas applies his mastery of classical drawing with his powerful observations of modern life to create a psychologically intense picture of a fleeting moment in time, identifying with the hard work and struggles of the dancer, a subject that the artist treated many times throughout his life. Edgar Degas (Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, 1834 - 1917) was a French painter, draftsman, sculptor, printmaker, a founder of the school of Impressionism, and a classical painter of dancers and scenes from modern life. Degas began to paint early in life, and after meeting the French classicist J.A.D. Ingres, Degas studied drawing in the manner of Ingres at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Louis Lamothe. Degas lived for 3 years in Italy, where he made many copies after Michelangelo and the masters of the Italian Renaissance. Establishing his Paris studio, the artist exhibited as a history painter but began to turn to subject matter from contemporary life, under the influence of his friend Edouard Manet. Disenfranchised from the official Paris Salon, Degas joined ranks with the independant Impressionist group and exhibited at their first show in 1874, though his classical approach, lack of spontaneity, and disdain of plein-air easel painting left him little in common with much of the group. Degas painted many portraits with profound psychological insight, many scenes from contemporary life and genre paintings, and devoted half of his life's work to colourful pictures of ballet dancers and classical female figures. Degas' bold experiments in colour which crossed boundaries between Realism, Impressionism, and Modern painting, his original compositional methods, and his painstaking, calculated classical drawing combined with the artist's cantankerous rejection of rigid rules, combined to create one of the most original and beloved body of works in the history of art.