The Metropolitan Museum of Art Degas Dancer Bookmark

Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) favored scenes of ballet dancers, laundresses, milliners, and denizens of Parisian low life. His interest in ballet dancers intensified in the 1870s, and eventually he produced approximately 1,500 works on the subject. These are not traditional portraits, but studies that capture the human body in movement and repose, exploring the physicality and discipline of the dancers, often from unexpected vantage points. Our bookmark reproduces a silhouetted detail from Dancer (ca. 1880), a pastel and charcoal drawing in The Met collection.