Three Dancers

Three Dancers gives a fascinating sense of Degas’s process. He reimagined the placement of limbs, and then heightened the dancers’ forms with a subtle economy of pastel. Long, repeated hatchings of pigment defy naturalistic description of flesh. The close proximity of the bodies and the subtle harmonies of their limbs—parallel legs on the bench and echoing extension of each figure’s left arm—create a unity and motion, traveling through the pyramid of torsos and tutus.