Waiting (Degas)

A pastel by the French Impressionist Edgar Degas, made between 1880 and 1882, part of a much larger series of over two hundred works Degas made on ballet dancers; only around fifty of that series show actual performance, the rest capturing rehearsal or unguarded backstage moments like this one. The work shows a young ballerina seated beside her chaperone, likely a former dancer herself, waiting before a stage entrance. Degas varies his pastel technique across the composition: subtle strokes for delicate detail, slashed marks for the bench, and hatching for the younger woman's dress, with the older woman rendered in severe oranges, browns and blacks against the dancer's soft pinks, blues and cream. It is jointly owned today by the Norton Simon Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/