Study of a Nude (Dancer at the Barre)

Edgar Degas

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This large-scale drawing dates to Degas’s late career when he made many variations of his compositions using charcoal on tracing paper. This figure of a dancer stretching over her leg on the barre appears in at least five other drawings, all of which relate to the painting "Dancers at the Barre" (early 1880s–ca.1900) in the Phillips Collection, Washington. Often Degas worked up these variants in pastel, though in this case he left the bold lines of charcoal bare, revealing his reworking of the form.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art