Edgar Degas

Danseuse is dated circa 1897–1900 in the auction-house entry, though the work is signed and the year 1897 is also given for it; the discrepancy is worth noting at the outset, since it places the sheet at the threshold of Degas's late period, when the dancer motif had long since ceased to be a subject and had become a working method. The medium is pastel on paper mounted on board, 54 by 36.8 centimetres, signed at the lower right. What the reproduction shows is a single figure, vertical in format, the body set against an unresolved ground that the pastel treats as atmosphere rather than as room. The dancer's posture is not the finished arabesque of the earlier ballet pictures but something more provisional, a stance caught between movements.

The documented life of the sheet is unusually full. Ambroise Vollard acquired it directly from the artist, and it passed through his estate before entering a sequence of private collections in France, Canada, the United States, Japan and Germany, surfacing at auction in Los Angeles in 1974, New York in 1987, 1990 and 1998, and finally through a New York gallery in 1999. Its publication history is equally specific: it was reproduced in Vollard's own 1914 volume of ninety-eight reproductions signed by Degas, and catalogued by Paul-André Lemoisne in 1946 as no. 1300. A possible appearance in Ottawa in 1950, in an exhibition of paintings from the Vollard collection, is recorded with the caution the source itself supplies.

These facts do not explain the drawing, but they establish that it was seen and kept early. The pastel's economy—few colours, the paper's tooth allowed to do part of the work—belongs to the late Degas as the literature describes him, a French Impressionist known above all for pastels. The figure is legible; the space around her is not, and that asymmetry is the work's real subject.