Degas’ Deux danseuses en jaune

Edgar Degas (1834-1917), *Danseuses jupes jaunes (Deux danseuses en jaune*) signed ‘Degas’ (lower right), pastel and charcoal on joined paper, 23¾ x 16 7/8 in. (60.2 x 42.4 cm.), Executed circa 1896, Image Source: Christie’s

“By the 1890s, pastel had become his most favoured medium as it allowed him a variety of techniques and, crucially, the chance to build up complex layered colour schemes, as is evident here…This is evident, for instance, in the areas of shadow and light, for instance the turquoise area by the right-hand dancer’s left leg…Degas’ attention to colour effects can be seen in a more striking way by the contrast between the yellow skirts of the title and the background, be it the floor or the green of the painted landscape of the screen behind them.”
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…Perhaps he best described his fascination with these dancers, with the artifice of their performances and the elegance of their movements, in the last lines of one of his own sonnets:

‘Leap, soar! you priestesses of grace,
For in you the Dance is embodied now,
Heroic and remote. From you we learn
Queens are made of distance and dyed flesh’

(Degas, quoted in R. Gordon & A. Forge, Degas, London, 1988, p. 192).
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